Google search is facing its biggest challenge in decades. And it’s not from Bing or Ask Jeeves. It’s from TikTok and Instagram. The rise of visual search has Google on notice but as this article from Mashable explains, the quality of information on these social platforms leave a lot to be desired.
A recent study from Newsguard found that 20% of videos that came up when searching for popular news stories on TikTok were “misinformation”. And that is a problem as more and more people get their information from the platform.
According to a Pew study, 16% of teenagers use TikTok “almost constantly” and Prabhakar Raghavan, a senior Vice President at Google, admitted at a conference in July, “In our studies, something like almost 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place to lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search. They go to TikTok or Instagram”.
This is going to be the media literacy challenge for Gen Z. A similar media literacy challenge that many Baby Boomers failed when they logged on to Facebook (but pleasingly, many millennials passed). Hopefully Gen Z, a generation that has grown up with the internet, can do better than the cohort of Baby Boomers that got sucked into Facebook’s news algorithms and came out believing that One America News Network was the only reliable source of news.
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