Scroll through your "For You" TikTok feed on any given day, and you might see it unfold in real time: a protest, a flood, a resignation speech, a war update. Before the push notifications land, before the website homepage updates, before a correspondent goes live, the moment is already there, circulating in portrait mode.

What started as a platform for lip-syncs and dance challenges has quietly turned into one of the world’s fastest-moving newswires, visual, participatory, and algorithmically amplified. And whether journalists like it or not, that transformation is redefining what breaking news means.

In the past few years, TikTok's evolution has been striking. The addition of features like photo posts, carousels, and embedded links for publishers has reshaped it into a kind of live, interactive timeline.

It’s not that TikTok wanted to be a news platform. It’s that the audiences made it one.

According to the Pew Research Center's “Social Media & News Fact Sheet” (2025) report, 53 per cent of US adults now say they at least sometimes get news from social media. Facebook (38 per cent) and YouTube (35 per cent) remain dominant, but TikTok is the one rewriting the rules.

In 2020, just 5 per cent of American adults said they regularly got news there. In 2025, that number is 20 per cent. Among TikTok users specifically, more than half (55 per cent) say they regularly consume news on the app.

For younger audiences, the shift is even more pronounced. Those aged 18-29 are now more likely to encounter breaking news on TikTok than on X, Reddit, or Instagram.

The platform’s role in news consumption has more than quadrupled in just five years, and that momentum shows no sign of slowing down.

The way newsrooms operate has changed along with it.

At Deutsche Welle (DW), we've seen........

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