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When he learned<\/span> one night this summer that the United States had bombed Iran, the content creator Aaron Parnas responded right away, showing what\u2019s bad and what\u2019s good about using TikTok for news. Shortly after 7:46 p.m. ET on June 21, he saw Donald Trump\u2019s Truth Social post announcing the air strikes. At 7:52, according to a time stamp, Parnas uploaded to TikTok a minute-long video in which he looked into the camera; read out the president\u2019s post, which identified the suspected nuclear sites that the U.S. had targeted; and added a note of skepticism about whether Iran would heed Trump\u2019s call for peace. As traditional media outlets revealed more details that night, Parnas summarized their findings in nine more reports, some of which he recorded from a car.<\/p>\n Parnas wasn\u2019t adding elaborate detail or original reporting. What he had to offer was speed\u2014plus a deep understanding of how to reach people on TikTok, which may not seem an obvious or trustworthy source of news: The platform is owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, which lawmakers in Washington, D.C., fear could be manipulated to promote Beijing\u2019s interests. TikTok\u2019s algorithm offers each user a personalized feed of short, grabby videos\u2014an arrangement that seems unlikely to serve up holistic coverage of current events.<\/p>\n Even so, according to a Pew Research Center poll from last fall, 17 percent of adults\u2014and 39 percent of adults under 30\u2014regularly get informed about current affairs on the app. Fewer than 1 percent of all TikTok accounts followed by Americans are traditional media outlets. Instead, users are relying not only on \u201cnewsfluencers\u201d such as Parnas but also on skits reenacting the latest Supreme Court ruling, hype videos for political agendas, and other news-adjacent clips that are hard to describe to people who don\u2019t use TikTok.<\/p>\n Last summer, after the first assassination attempt on Trump, one viral video fused clips of the bloody-eared Republican raising his fist with snippets of Joe Biden\u2019s well wishes. Simultaneously, Chappell Roan\u2019s ballad for the lovestruck, \u201cCasual,\u201d played, hinting at a bromance. On my For You page in June, as U.S.-Iran tensions flared, I saw a string of videos known as \u201cedits\u201d\u2014minute-long music montages\u2014on the general topic. One spliced together footage of zooming F-16s, Captain America intimidating his enemies in an elevator, and bald eagles staring ominously while AC\/DC\u2019s \u201cThunderstruck\u201d blared. Skeptics might wonder: When people say they get their news from TikTok, what exactly are they learning?<\/p>\n Frequent consumers of current-affairs content on TikTok insist that they can decipher what\u2019s going on in the world\u2014that, even if they have to extrapolate facts from memes, the brevity and entertainment value compensate for a lack of factual detail. \u201cA lot of things are in simpler terms on TikTok,\u201d Miles Maltbia, a 22-year-old cybersecurity analyst from Chicago, told me. \u201cThat, and convenience, makes it the perfect place to get all my news from.\u201d And as more and more users turn to TikTok for news, creators such as Parnas are finding ways to game the algorithm.<\/p>\n Parnas, who is<\/span> 26, is a lawyer by trade. He told me that he monitors every court case he deems significant with a legal tracker. He was immersed in politics at an early age. (His father, Lev Parnas, gained brief notoriety as an associate of Rudy Giuliani during Trump\u2019s first term. \u201cI love my dad,\u201d Aaron Parnas has said. \u201cAnd I\u2019m not my dad.\u201d) C-SPAN is on \u201call day every day.\u201d And he\u2019s enabled X and Truth Social notifications for posts from every member of Congress and major world leader. When he decides that his phone\u2019s alerts are newsworthy, he hits the record button. His rapid-reaction formula for news has made him a one-man media giant: He currently has 4.2 million followers on TikTok. He told me that his videos on the platform have reached more than 100 million American users in the past six months. His Substack newsletter also has the most subscriptions of any in the \u201cnews\u201d category, and he recently interviewed Senator Cory Booker, French Foreign Minister Jean-No\u00ebl Barrot, and this magazine\u2019s editor in chief.<\/p>\n Still, Parnas\u2019s TikTok model relies heavily on reporting by other outlets. And Parnas\u2019s 24\/7 information blitz may be jarring for those whose media-consumption habits are not already calibrated for TikTok. There\u2019s no \u201cGood evening\u201d or \u201cWelcome.\u201d But he\u2019s reaching an audience who other media don\u2019t: Many of his viewers, he thinks, are \u201cyoung people who don\u2019t watch the news and never have and never will.\u201d He added, \u201cThey just don\u2019t have the attention span to.\u201d<\/p>\n Ashley Acosta, a rising senior at the University of Pennsylvania, told me she liked the fact that Parnas is his own boss, outside the corporate media world. She contrasted him with outlets such as ABC, which recently fired the correspondent Terry Moran for an X post that called Trump a \u201cworld-class hater.\u201d Nick Parigi, a 24-year-old graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, also sees Parnas as a valuable news source. \u201cYou\u2019re getting less propagandized,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt\u2019s not pushing an agenda.\u201d Last year, Parnas explicitly supported Kamala Harris\u2019s presidential candidacy, but he prides himself on delivering basic information in a straightforward manner. \u201cI wish we would just go back to the fact-based, Walter Cronkite\u2013style of reporting,\u201d he told me. \u201cSo that\u2019s what I do.\u201d For Parnas to sound like the CBS News legend, you\u2019d have to watch his TikToks at half speed.<\/p>\n If Parnas is a genre-defining anchor, Jack Mac is the equivalent of a shock jock. A creator with 1.1 million followers, he uses the term \u201cjournalisming\u201d to describe his work, which amounts to commenting on stories he finds interesting or amusing\u2014such as a \u201cpatriot\u201d New York firefighter being suspended for letting young women ride in his firetruck.<\/p>\n \u201cDo I think TikTok is the best source for news? No,\u201d Olivia Stringfield, a 25-year-old from South Carolina who works in marketing, told me. But she\u2019s a fan of Mac because he offers \u201ca more glamorous way to get the news\u201d\u2014and a quick, convenient way. \u201cI don\u2019t have time to sit down and read the paper like my parents did,\u201d Stringfield said.<\/p>\n Robert Kozinets, a professor at the University of Southern California who has studied Gen Z\u2019s media consumption on TikTok, told me that users rarely seek out news. It finds them. \u201cThe default position is: Algorithm, let the information flow over me,\u201d he said. \u201cLoad me up. I\u2019ll interrupt it when I see something interesting.\u201d On a platform where little content is searched, creators dress up the news to make it algorithm friendly.<\/p>\n The Washington Post<\/em> is one established media brand that has leaned into the growing format of TikTok news skits. In one video about the Supreme Court, a Post <\/em>staffer wearing a college-graduation robe wields a toolbox mallet as a gavel to channel Chief Justice John Roberts, and when she mimics him, her background turns into red curtains. \u201cSouth Carolina can<\/em> cut off Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood,\u201d she says. Dave Jorgenson, who launched the Post<\/em>\u2019s TikTok channel in 2019, announced recently that he\u2019s leaving to set up his own online-video company\u2014a testament to the demand for this new style of content.<\/p>\n The Post<\/em>\u2019s embrace of TikTok has been unusual for an outlet of the newspaper\u2019s stature. The prevalence of vibes-based content on the video platform raises obvious questions about truth and accuracy. Many users I spoke with trusted crowdsourced fact-checking to combat misinformation, via the comments section. I asked Maltbia, the analyst from Chicago, how he knows which comments to trust. \u201cI\u2019ll usually look at the ones that are the most liked,\u201d he said. \u201cBut if it still sounds a little shady to me, then I\u2019ll probably Google it.\u201d<\/p>\n Parnas defended the integrity of TikTok news. \u201cThere\u2019s no more misinformation on TikTok than there is on Twitter, than there is on Fox News, than sometimes there is on CNN,\u201d he told me. That claim is impossible to verify: TikTok\u2019s factual accuracy is under-researched. One assessment by the media watchdog NewsGuard found that 20 percent of TikTok\u2019s news search results contained misinformation\u2014but no user I spoke with bothers with the app\u2019s search function.<\/p>\n Whether TikTok will continue to gain popularity as a news outlet isn\u2019t yet clear. Citing fears of hostile foreign control over a major communications platform, Congress overwhelmingly passed legislation aimed at forcing TikTok\u2019s Chinese owners to sell. But Trump has now delayed implementation of the law three times since he took office.<\/p>\n In the meantime, users of the platform keep stretching the definition of news<\/em>. On TikTok, \u201cnews is anything that\u2019s new,\u201d Kozinets, the USC professor, told me. Entrepreneurial creators who care about current events will keep testing delivery formats to gain more eyeballs on the platform. And even if TikTok is sold or shuts down, similar apps are sure to fill any vacuum. The challenge of packaging news for distribution by a black-box algorithm seems here to stay.<\/p>\n