Pew: one in five US adults regularly get news on TikTok.
A fifth of US adults now regularly get news on TikTok, according to Pew Research Center figures published on 19 October. The share hasn't moved since 2025, but it was just 3% in 2020.
Pew surveyed 5,166 US adults between 24 and 30 August 2026. Age is the sharpest divide: 39% of 18 to 29-year-olds regularly get news on TikTok, against 25% of those aged 30 to 49, 11% of 50 to 64-year-olds and 4% of people 65 and over. Roughly a third of Black (32%) and Hispanic (35%) adults do so, compared with 14% of both White and Asian adults. Democrats and those leaning Democrat (22%) are a little ahead of Republicans and Republican leaners (15%).
TikTok's overall reach in the US is narrower than the big platforms. Pew finds 37% of Americans use it, behind YouTube (84%), Facebook (70%) and Instagram (51%) but ahead of WhatsApp (33%), LinkedIn (31%), Reddit (25%) and X (18%). Among people who do use TikTok, 53% regularly get news there, close to the 55% recorded in 2025 and far above 22% in 2020. That puts TikTok level with Facebook and X, where 57% of each platform's users get news, and ahead of the other sites Pew tracks.
The numbers have flattened after years of steep growth, and the survey has limits. It is US-only, it relies on what people say they do, and it doesn't show whether the news they see comes from publishers, journalists or individual creators. It also doesn't measure how much of their news TikTok supplies.
There is no matching Pew data for Saudi Arabia or the Gulf, so the figures shouldn't be read across directly. The pattern is still useful for Gulf marketers: younger audiences treat a short-video app as a news source, which matters for brand-safety settings, for publishers building creator-led news formats, and for brands that plan content around current events.
Why it matters
TikTok has settled in as a mainstream news source for younger Americans, which affects brand safety, publisher partnerships and where news-style creator content runs.
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