“The Hollywood sign has burned down!” is just one of many fake news headlines you might find on TikTok. 

As social media gains more popularity and youths become more interested in news and politics, fake headlines and misinformation are rampant, deceiving viewers. Specifically, social media sites like TikTok tend to be a quick way to get daily news, but TikTok’s design makes it an unreliable source, often spreading misinformation. 

With the creation of the internet and the rise of social media, news has become increasingly accessible and shareable. Using TikTok as an outlet to get information and news can have many benefits, such as personalization, shareability and easy access. 

However, using TikTok for news can also have many drawbacks. While not all news on TikTok is untrue, a significant amount of it is. Anyone can post on the platform, so if someone wants to post false information, they can. Verifying author credibility and fact checking is nearly impossible to do within the app, since creators frequently neglect to cite their sources. This is a problem for readers because they take in information and swallow it whole, immediately believing what they see and neglecting to fact check it. 

One video I stumbled across was a post that has reached over a million likes with the headline, “Mexico has shut down its border with US due to tariffs taking effect today.” The original video has since been removed, and the above link displays a repost of the video. This was easily disproved by a Times Now article by Saihaj Madan, which was only one Google search away. 

While this outlandish video seemed too crazy to be true, viewers failed to fact check the news on their feed. One commenter wrote, “Mexico closed the border when THEY were good and ready,” another commenter jokes, “crazy it took this to close the border. Trump already making changes.” While not all viewers were deceived by this misinformation, a lot were, and that’s a problem.

Fake news may seem harmless, but it isn’t. According to an East Carolina University article Fake News, Misinformation, and Disinformation as Cyber Security Threats, “Fake news can cause individuals to act in harmful ways.” In addition to getting updates on the latest events, readers often use news as a way to form opinions or political views, and if a reader unknowingly uses misinformation to form these ideas, they can make decisions that harm themselves or their community. 

For instance, during the 2016 election, false information significantly impacted voters’ perceptions’ of candidates. According to a UCF TODAY article, How Fake News Affects U.S. Elections, “voters were more likely to vote for President Trump in the last election [2016 election] if they believed the fake news about Hillary Clinton that they saw on social media.” 

I don’t personally have an opinion on the outcome of the election, but voters were wrongly informed on presidential candidates because of misinformation and could have caused many voters to make an ill-informed decision, further emphasizing the issue with misinformation on social media. 

As youths become increasingly interested in politics and real world problems, they have begun to turn to apps like TikTok to get their political information. In the latest election, candidates used TikTok to reach more voters because young people regularly use TikTok to keep up with politics. 

An article from the Pew Research Center, More Americans – especially young adults – are regularly getting news on TikTok, found that about one-third of Americans ages 19-29 are often using TikTok to get news. President Donald Trump even gives credit to TikTok for being the reason he won the youth vote in the 2024 presidential election. 

“We won the young vote, and I think we won it through TikTok,” Trump said in a press conference.

Youth becoming more involved in politics is important; however, the increased use of TikTok to educate themselves on politics is not the best way of going about it.

The way TikTok is designed heavily contributes to this spread of misinformation. Since viewers are quickly scrolling through their feed, content creators often have to implement new strategies to grab readers’ attention, which can include starting videos with hugely exaggerated headlines that may stretch the truth because it’s “more interesting.” 

TikTok also has a very well designed algorithm that shows viewers videos related to what they often interact with. However, this causes people who often interact with fake news videos to become trapped in echo chambers of misinformation because of TikTok’s algorithm. 

In addition, because of TikTok’s short video style and viewers’ short attention span, content creators are often forced to fit big stories into small segments that are more easy to digest. However, these content creators are inexperienced and often leave important information and key details of specific news headlines. They leave out a significant amount of context that causes readers to misunderstand the purpose behind the stories they see.

One video posted by the user kxs_27 covering the LA wildfires displayed a montage of big LA landmarks with the title “I can’t believe this is all gone” and is captioned “so you’re telling me the Hollywood sign is gone? RIP LA.”

It was true that there were fires raging in LA, but the original poster of the video suggests big landmarks like the Hollywood sign had been burned down, which is incorrect, and is just generally extremely vague on the topic. 

However, TikTok is not entirely apathetic about this spread of false information. They do make an effort to reduce the amount of misinformation being shared on their site, implementing automated moderation systems and tens of thousands of content moderators who review flagged content. 

According to an article TikTok and the War on Misinformation from Capitol Technology University, “They have collaborated with reputable fact-checking organizations like PolitiFact and Snopes to identify and remove false or misleading content from the platform.” 

The spread of misinformation on TikTok doesn’t seem to be the fault of the platform, but of content creators and viewers. 

While one might be intrigued by the news on TikTok, viewers should ensure they are fact-checking it before taking it into consideration or sharing it. Use Google to search for news headlines shared on TikTok and try to find a source that is credible to determine whether or not what was shown is true, being sure to take into account the author, dates and any bias that the article may have. 

It’s also important to use credible fact-checking sites like FactCheck.org to verify information. Snopes and PolitiFact can also be very helpful when identifying and disproving false facts. These websites allow users to search through a huge selection of articles that fact-check common misconceptions that may have been spread online through social media. These sites also use a multitude of reliable sources and are a great way to check the information seen on TikTok or other social media sites.

With another TikTok ban deadline approaching on Apr. 5, according to NBC News, TikTok may not be around for much longer. While some believe this is an infringement of First Amendment rights, I believe that it could be beneficial as it would force users to stop digesting fake news and seek out alternative, reliable sources that can give them the most recent and factual information.