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TikTok is rapidly gaining momentum as a leading social media platform for the production, dissemination, and consumption of tailor-made short (news) videos. Thus far, the narrow body of scholarship on the intersection of TikTok and news has predominantly highlighted the production processes and output of traditional journalists working at legacy news organisations, neglecting non-traditionally journalistic users producing news-like videos. We conduct various computational analyses on all #news and/or #nachrichten videos uploaded to TikTok in 2023 from within Germany, Austria, or Switzerland, comparing the videos from 17 major journalistic news outlets with those from general users. To pinpoint differences between videos labeled as news-related by professional news outlets and ordinary users, we structure our research around hashtag, auditory and visual characteristics, the key elements of content creation, and - in such a combination - unique to TikTok. Our results show clear differences between the two video creator sets in the hashtag and visual characteristics but similarities in the auditory.
Wedel et al. (Tue,) studied this question.