This article was written by The Zillennial Zine’s spring editorial intern Henry Ryeder. Find him on Instagram at @henryryeder. If you would like to share an article with The Zillennial, send us an email at thezillennialzine@gmail.com.
“One of the reasons I love TikTok so much,” says Career Coach Mandy in one recent video, “Is that we are getting information on the real stuff that’s happening.” Mandy then explains what she alleges is the “Great Salary Reset,” in which companies lay off employees and hire new ones at a significant pay cut.
“This is going to absolutely blow your mind,” says “realtor” Freddie Smith in his video on the “Silent Depression.” Smith goes onto display a beautifully lo-fi infographic comparing living costs and salaries between the Great Depression and in 2024. The comment section was a group therapy round of lamentation, “But if I just stop buying coffee I could afford it right?!”
The beauty of these videos is that while they offer the auspice of evidence, they purposefully stop short of offering explanation. There’s the implicit conspiracy: the Silent Depression is being covered up, there are shadow forces behind the Great Salary Reset (itself an offshoot the popular Pandemic-Era Great Reset theory.) Yet in keeping sources hidden while also refusing to offer theses, these videos accomplish the mighty balancing act of social media content: make your audience feel very much, say very little.
You’d be justified in questioning why I opened with a critique of social media news, especially giving examples whose intentions could very easily argued as noble. I’m also not disagreeing with the implicit understanding of these videos (capitalism exploits laborers and the middle class is shrinking) and to some degree, I believe both of these perspectives. Yet the way that these videos are framed should be viewed with skepticism.
The layoffs that Mandy is referring to is true, it’s also true that after layoffs, the same positions are often listed with significantly lower salaries. And the technology sector is currently contending with a massive drop in investment. Interest rates have soared with the Fed’s attempt to curb inflation, and tech companies (especially sensitive to changes in investor bullishness) are slashing their workforces in desperation to remain profitable. This is evil, it’s terrible, and it’s unacceptable.
And there’s reason to believe that companies are laying off employees in order to reset expectations following a glut of hiring and talent during the pandemic. After all, there’s financial incentive for cutting costs, and corporate willingness to shed human beings in the interest of the bottom line is hardly news.
I have much less sympathy for Smith’s video. The chart contains so many glaring inaccuracies and fundamental misunderstandings of context, history, and economics that it deserves its own article. For the sake of time, I’ll just mention that while capitalism sucks, corporations are evil, and working families are living paycheck to paycheck, we are not worse off than we were in the freakin’ Great Depression.
The framework of conspiracy theory, even when one is likely, has unintended chilling effects. I’m aware that this runs counter to recent, flagrant examples of conspiracy theories, but think of what they do at their broadest. They demoralize. If it’s all a massive conspiracy, then what’s the point in trying to fix anything? Couple this with omission of the careful omission of evidence. Smith’s refusal to offer citation or context, and Mandy’s appropriation of the Great Reset term, implies something that is felt rather than seen. The distinction between the two is one of the important calculations in news media. If assertions don’t require evidence, then they also don’t require argument. If there’s no argument, then there’s no engagement. If there’s no engagement, then there’s no call to action. If there’s no possibility for public action, what the hell is the news media for?
The answer to that question is ideological reinforcement. The weakness of these “explainers” is that they’re not designed to explain anything. They’re designed to further calcify a belief that a target audience already holds. I picked “EconomyTok” as an example for the very reason that I agree with the majority of what I see. And still, these videos display that popular social media commentators can be prone to the same tendencies as the legacy media institutions that their audiences are rejecting.
In study after study conducted over the past several years, Gen Z and Millennials are continuously foregoing traditional news outlets for social media. In a survey of over 500 respondents in 2022, 50% of Gen Z’ers claimed that they received news from social media daily, compared to over 60% who claimed that they received news from national newspapers “never.” A survey from February of this year showed the social media news-consuming portion even larger, registering at 63%. I’d argue that the biggest reason for this change is technological. Gen Z are on their phones an average of seven hours per day, 92% higher than the national average. More specifically, they’re on social media for fours hours of that daily share.
Still, legacy media institutions aren’t without their hipper attempts to reach the kids where they’re at. By this point, most of the nation’s largest newspapers have their own TikTok accounts. The Daily, a podcast hosted by Times journalists Michael Barbaro and Sabrina Tavernisi, has been embraced by millions of listeners, many of whom are young adults. There are less quantifiable changes that have benefited legacy media as well. Following Donald Trump’s election, publications such as the Washington Post and the New York Times became more widely seen as pillar of truth and integrity, fighting the good fight in a battle for democracy. The publication of Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s investigation of Harvey Weinstein effectively instigated the #MeToo and modern Women’s Movements. Why oh why, would Gen Z become disillusioned with legacy media?
The political division among the American Left has been made violently apparent in the months since October 7. Following Hamas’s attack on Israel and the ensuing ethnic cleansing of Gaza, legacy media institutions have struggled to adhere to 75 years of propaganda while maintaining the air of “journalistic integrity.” No publication has suffered quite as publicly as the “Paper of Record.”
In the weeks following the onslaught of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the New York Times made a series of headline choices that were quickly called out by activists and other publications as showing overt pro-Israel bias. It wasn’t long before the extent of the Times’s failures in reporting Palestinian deaths became widely shared. Comparisons showed the terminology used by the Times to differentiate between Israel’s “victims” and Palestine’s “combatants.” The Times’s coverage of the bombing of Al-Shifa Hospital went through several editions and retractions, displaying the paper’s careful cowering to Pro-Israel sentiment while tens of thousands of Palestinians were being actively murdered.
This coverage is nothing if not decades old. Max Frankel, an editor at the New York Times in the 1980’s and 90’s, revealed “I myself wrote most of our Middle East commentaries. As more Arab than Jewish readers recognized, I wrote them from a pro-Israel perspective.” William Safire, a speech writer for Nixon who narrowly escaped the maw of the Watergate Scandal, spent his later years as a Times columnist. In one of his more colorful denouncements of a Palestine/Israel peace summit in 2000, Stephens wrote, “by flooding Israel with ‘returning’ Palestinians, the plan in its promised final phase would drive the hated Jews from the Middle East.”
Today, the bias in the Times continues to haunt and taint its reputation. This was reflected recently in one of the most spectacular failures of journalism in recent times: the so-called “Screams Without Words” piece. Framed as an investigation into Hamas’s alleged sexual violence in the October 7th attack, the piece was founded on unvetted sources and hearsay. Writer Anat Schwartz was instructed to find evidence for the article and later claimed that, as for the Times, “There was no skepticism on their part, ever.” In a podcast discussing her work on the piece, Schwartz remarked on a moment in her “investigation” during which she couldn’t ascertain anything specific about allegations of sexual violence, including names, primary sources, or accurate numbers. Still, she concluded, “Something about it is systematic, something about it feels to me that it’s not random.” An episode of the Daily based on the article had to be scrapped after it failed to pass a fact-check.
It’s difficult to underscore the profoundness of the Times’s unwillingness to cover the atrocities unfolding in Palestine. In the span of a few months, the New York Times has gone from a trusted publication among younger readers to categorically rebuked (even if this pattern is decades old.) It’s a gravitational shift in media leanings that will have implications far outside the bounds of this decade. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in twenty years, we read about this moment as the beginning of the end of the New York Times.
But before we fret the loss of all those undeniably solid scone recipes, it’s important to acknowledge social media news sources who are doing outstanding work. The most prominent examples is Bisan Owda, whose primary coverage of the atrocities in Palestine have been heralded by activists and human rights organizations alike. Jess Natale, the editor of the social media pages “So.Informed,” diligently sources all her claims and stories, making clear statements about the issues she’s describing.
And while few TikTok explainer creators are complicit in a century-long apartheid, the exaltation of feeling over evidence can be damaging. Take the overturning of Roe V. Wade for example. In this election cycle, in which our two options can often feel tragically similar, it can feel very good to reduce the substance of partisan rhetoric to “end-of-history”-like arguments about both the failure of representative democracy in America. I don’t disagree with this at all; I do have a problem with how these arguments are often conveniently reduced.
Several videos over the last few years have discussed frustration over Joe Biden’s promise to codify Roe into law, while simultaneously overseeing its effective reversal in 2022 by the Supreme Court. In this reading, it can certainly seem that Biden failed in this regard. It would also make it easier to reconcile that he’s managing our complicity in genocide. It’s a concise argument. It’s a tidy argument.
Yet the codification process requires congressional approval before it reaches the office of the president. In both Congressional terms while Biden has been president, the codification of Roe has been virtually impossible. This isn’t meant to excuse our broken system, and trust me, I’m not defending a war criminal. Biden will go down as Genocide Joe for good reason. However, this doesn’t excuse us, as news consumers on a democratized platform, for disregarding evidence in favor of content that makes us feel right.
As evidenced in our generation’s unwillingness to accept conventional Western narratives, there are so many ways in which social media can provide more accurate news than ever before. Yet the incentive to reduce everything to bite-size bits has seductive implicit bias. Noam Chomsky makes this point quite brilliantly in his description of concision regarding the American media machine of the 1990’s. Elaborating on his reluctance to appear on Nightline, Chomsky explained that the format of television news, segments divided by commercial breaks, imposed concision on the speaker. This concision necessitates conventional wisdom, as something that doesn’t “regurgitate” pithy pieties understandably calls for evidence and explanation. In the media landscape that Chomsky was referring to, this imposition of concision was contained to the same conservative worldview that reflects such medias apparatuses as the New York Times’s Morning Newsletter and The Daily.
Yet the imposition of concision on social media platforms can have a similar effect, and it’s much more conservative than we’d like to believe. In reducing facts and realities to explainers that simply reinforce leftist conventional wisdom, we’re encouraged not to take action, not to seek evidence, and not to question authority. After all, what’s there to question if it’s all a massive conspiracy, if there’s nothing we can do? We grumble about it, share the videos, and use them as talking points in commiserating with friends who feel the same, but there’s no revelation, only influence.
In social media news, influence is a capital resource. Influence doesn’t often translate to political thought or action, rather it suggests the distillation of a feeling already held. While this influence may utilize politically radical terminology, its reinforcement of ideology through short form explainers can have the opposite intended effect. It can pacify the viewer, leaving them satisfied with the knowledge that while the world may be terrible, it’s ultimately outside of the viewer’s control.
I want to distinguish some different aspects of social media news here, as this article should hopefully display my desire to approach the many facets of our news media landscape with nuance. There is nothing nuanced about the genocide and occupation of Palestine. There is nothing nuanced about a woman’s right to choose. There is nothing nuanced about income inequality. There is nothing nuanced about systemic racism.
And while I’m concerned with the flattening effects of some social media news coverage, I don’t feel pacified when I see videos of the war in Gaza. I feel angry. When So.Informed shows a thoroughly researched factsheet, I feel angry. I feel like there’s something that must be done.
Compare this with the elite consensus manufacturing machine of the Times, or what will inevitably evolve into our generation’s (albeit fractured) consensus manufacturing machine: social media. When someone opens a 30 second video with, “This is going to blow your mind,” be wary. When someone argues that “twenty minutes a day, five days a week” is how “the news should sound,” be wary. Be especially cautious if, after your consumption of this media, you’re left not confused, but sated, as if your fears, angers, and awareness of the world were fortified.
News should be discomforting, it should encourage the reader to seriously question a preconceived notion about their reality and their place in it. That’s exactly why, out of respect for one’s mental health, it shouldn’t be experienced all the time.
The differences between the failures of the New York Times and the failures of TikTok explainers to accurately deliver the news are clear. A massive corporate entity closer in age to the Declaration of Independence than Roe v. Wade, the Times panders to the forces that allow its power and reach. While this calculation may allow the paper its access, it’s certainly not an excuse for failing to report some of the biggest humanitarian tragedies of the last century.
Is social media replacing journalism? Social media is new, its news media content creators are often young, not vetted, and without the networks of contacts and years of reporting and research experience that come with the gatekeeping nature of legacy media. While many of these creators do brilliant and heroic work, work is hard. Regurgitating consensus to people who already agree is much more incentivized, even if that comes in the form of leftist ideology.
I don’t expect the transition from legacy media to social media news to revolutionize how young people act upon the world. I expect it to revolutionize how young people see the world. Whether this sea change will be relegated to a hipper version of Nightline is to be determined. I personally believe that there’s enough anger, disenchantment, and steady flow of information for a real generational shift in political action. There’s evidence enough to suggest that it’s already started. Yet this will require work, not just by people like Bisan Owda and Jess Natale, but by consumers of news media.
Make sure your news isn’t concise, make sure it cites evidence. Make sure that it doesn’t simply reinforce something you believe, even if it’s a belief to which your peer group largely adheres. I don’t mean this to say that you should watch Tucker Carlson walk a shopping cart around Moscow. That’s not news, that’s propaganda. There’s decades of literature on the differences between the two, and nothing I say will offer a satisfactory definition of either outside my own Overton Window. However, if you’re careful and diligent, you’ll come to your own understanding, and that’s more important than anywhere you get your news.
What do you think? Is social media replacing journalism? Let us know in the comments below!
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