US adults on TikTok follow influencers and creators popular on social media but very few politicians, civic actors, or traditional media outlets and journalists
Context & Ripple Effects
This adds a follow-graph view to Pew’s earlier finding that TikTok participation is highly uneven: the most active quarter of adult users produced nearly all public posts in a creator-concentrated TikTok ecosystem.
It also helps explain why seeing news on social platforms does not necessarily mean users joined for news, as Pew found across major platforms in its cross-platform news-use survey. On TikTok, the accounts that command explicit audience attention are chiefly creators rather than institutional sources.
First-order effects
- Creators and influencers retain the clearest direct route to TikTok audiences, while politicians, civic groups, news outlets and journalists have comparatively limited follower-based distribution.
- TikTok’s information environment is therefore shaped more by whom users choose to follow among creators than by direct subscriptions to traditional or civic institutions.
Second-order effects
- News organizations and civic actors seeking TikTok reach must compete for attention in a creator-led feed rather than rely on their institutional brands or follower counts alone.
- The finding reinforces the importance of news creators: a later Pew survey found that one in five U.S. adults gets news from social-media influencers, expanding the potential role of intermediary personalities in news distribution.
Third-order effects
- If this pattern persists, public-information distribution on short-form video platforms will become more dependent on independent creator networks than on direct publisher or civic-account relationships.
- That shift can make accountability, sourcing and audience trust more fragmented, because institutional information increasingly reaches users through intermediaries rather than through the originating organizations.
The trend: TikTok is part of a broader shift from institution-led social audiences toward creator-mediated discovery and information distribution.