Why college students prefer News Daddy over The New York Times

AnkitAnkit Khanal gets his news from News Daddy. More than 20 times a day, Khanal, a sophomore at George Mason University, opens TikTok to have the biggest stories of the day delivered to him by a bleach-blonde 26-year-old named Dylan Page, one of the leading faces in a growing community of news influencers. Based in the United Kingdom, Page began posting content on TikTok in August 2020 and has since grown his “News Daddy Empire,” his posts amassing over 1.5 billion likes. His content spans breaking news, politics, pop culture, and sometimes, personal workout videos — delivered in the increasingly common, enthusiastic “YouTube accent.” While Page doesn’t explicitly cite his sources in every video, News Daddy appears to get his information from a mix of conventional news outlets, social media, and other influencers.

As a computer science major, Khanal says he’s cautious of algorithms and their effects on media consumption. He even wrote and delivered a speech on the topic to his peers for one of his classes. The thesis: “If you realize it or not, algorithms are determining everything on social media. From the content that you interact with to the opinions you form on the app. They are secretly affecting your life in ways that can be harmful.” The irony is not lost on him. Khanal understands TikTok is not always a reliable source; his presentation thoroughly explained how misinformation is quick to spread on social media. If Khanal wants to fact-check a video, he browses the comment section. “Most of the time, if the video is big enough, you will see something in the top comments telling you, like, ‘Hey, this is just wrong.’ That’s when I would actually look.”

And yet, rather than read traditional journalistic outlets that do the work of reporting, he still gets most of his news from aggregators like News Daddy. Social media is simply a more appealing news source for Khanal, who says he’s turned off by the biases and political leanings of traditional news outlets. News influencers, on the other hand, are “actually connected to the people they’re getting their news for.” Khanal’s behavior is not unusual. Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab polled 1,026 students at 181 two- and four-year institutions from December 19th to 23rd, 2024, on their media literacy practices. In January of this year, the survey results were published, showing that social media is a “top news source” for nearly three in four students. Of those surveyed, “half at least somewhat trust platforms such as Instagram and TikTok to deliver that news and other critical information accurately.” And word of mouth ranked second among students’ most popular news sources, an avenue for half of those surveyed. Legacy media, primarily newspapers, on the other hand, are regular news sources for just two in 10 students, even though they indicate that newspapers are more likely to convey accurate information.

Professor Karen North, founder of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg digital media program, agrees with the study’s findings. At the beginning of each of her classes, North discusses with her students the day’s most relevant headlines. She asks them where they caught wind of those events. The three most common answers among her students each semester: “They get their news from Instagram and TikTok. And from their professors.” But North says classroom newsgetting is a distant third, far behind social media’s grip on student news sourcing culture.

Zau Lahtaw, a junior at Syracuse University, says he also gets his news from scrolling on TikTok, primarily from Dylan Page, as well as from a talking fish — styled after the animated news anchor that delivers “breaking news” in SpongeBob SquarePants. “I don’t know. It’s just funny,” Lahtaw says.

There are several popular talking fish accounts on Instagram, the most popular of which — @realtalkingfish, self-titled “America’s #1 news source!” — uploads daily news snippets to its 1.4 million followers. But there are countless pages across both Instagram and TikTok that deploy an AI-generated version of Bikini Bottom’s aquatic anchor to reach millions of viewers. Lahtaw says he doesn’t actively search for these pages, but on TikTok, the videos pop up on his feed anyway. And if the story interests him, he’ll sit through the video. That’s how he learned of Israel’s strikes on military and nuclear facilities in Iran. Lahtaw had been scrolling through his TikTok For You page — as he usually does for two to three hours a day — when he came across the fish news anchor explaining the attack had transpired earlier that morning. Lahtaw searched Google to check if the attack was real, and remembers confirming that it was, though he can’t recall if he’d read an article from CNN or ABC.

Just over a week later, Lahtaw learned from News Daddy that the US launched military strikes against Iran. After that first video, his feed was immediately flooded with posts about getting drafted for a potential World War III. He watched a few of these videos before returning to Google to verify that the draft was confined to memes. “I see the TikTok, I see more, I get interested, I look it up online.”

The TikTok-to-Google pipeline is not unique to Lahtaw. Among the 18 college students I spoke to for this story, this fact-checking funnel was overwhelmingly pervasive; all students were on either TikTok or Instagram or both and often turned to Google after seeing news on their feeds that they wanted to verify. North says her students do similarly, although most don’t google to read articles: “They search or google things and they only read, for the most part, the AI response as a shortcut, and they just assume that it’s correct.” She says, for her students, “AI is the new sort of Wikipedia.”

Stanford sophomore Zachary Gottlieb is the Opinions section managing editor for The Stanford Daily. Through the school, Gottlieb has free access to publications like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic — and he says he trusts the sources Stanford provides. Each morning, he browses daily newsletters and reads articles that catch his eye — usually national and global headlines. Throughout the day, his phone buzzes with emails and alerts on developing and breaking stories. Sometimes, he reads a few articles before going to sleep.

But even when he’s not actively seeking out the news, his exposure to social media is relentless. On Instagram and TikTok, outside of posts by followed publications, it’s impossible, during his one to two hours of daily scrolling, to avoid posts from News Daddy or fellow news-oriented influencers. Gottlieb uses words like “ubiquitous” and “chronic” to characterize the ineludible onslaught of headlines. “Nowadays, it could be anywhere. You open your phone or you open Instagram to go DM someone or search something up completely unrelated or open TikTok to relax and just be hit with something.”

Hoping to relax in the afternoon of September 10th, Gottlieb opened TikTok and was met with an infographic detailing Charlie Kirk’s shooting. Over the frenzied first hours after the fatal attack, Gottlieb saw graphic videos of Kirk being fatally shot while speaking at an event at Utah Valley University — each clip racking up millions of views, even from viewers who did not want to see them. “‘Wait, is this real? Is this, like, a joke or something?’” Gottlieb wondered at first. “Obviously, I verified.” He googled it. “And then later, obviously after it was confirmed that he was, in fact, killed, there were strong reactions, like, everywhere, obviously. And then I saw many Instagram stories, as happens with a lot of these kinds of things.”

InIn Instagram’s early, saturated years, the typical teen scrolling through their feed would have seen vibrant vacation photos, filtered sunsets, and colorful snapshots of a Starbucks Frappuccino. Today, many feeds have traded effervescent aesthetics for infographic activism, turquoise for text. In the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement and as Instagram continues to expand its carousel cap, the platform has evolved into a favored space for activists and students to like and share their politics in the form of posts.

Politics-related content characterizes 80 percent — a percentage by her own estimation — of what Harvard freshman Aria-Vue Daugherty sees on her feed. She swipes through dozens of activism-centered stories, posts, and reposts daily from friends. “Most of my friends I have made through various types of political organizing, so I feel like most people I follow are reposting news and that usually comes in the form of either some random sort of politically inclined person talking at you, from a reel or infographics, usually on their stories.” Sometimes, if she comes across a post she resonates with, she’ll repost it onto her own story.

Daugherty regularly reads The New York Times, USA Today, The Associated Press, The Harvard Crimson, and the occasional articles from The Economist and The Atlantic. Though she says she tries to be intentional about her sources, the majority of the news she sees and reads is what pops up on Instagram, posts from sites she follows, or peers’ reposts. (In contrast to TikTok, Instagram tends to show users more posts from the accounts they choose to follow and fewer random viral videos.) When Daugherty opened Instagram while on campus on May 22nd, she estimates she saw at least 100 posts from peers — reposted infographics, reels — reacting to the news that the Department of Homeland Security had revoked Harvard’s certification to enroll international students. (International students make up over a quarter of the school’s total enrollment.) She checked an article from The Harvard Crimson to make sure it was true. Instagram, she says, is a convenient entry point, a quick way to stay up to date. “I think it would have taken me longer to go and check my email and read the Crimson daily briefing.”

By midday, it seemed like “everyone was very aware” of the news. Over the next few weeks, Daugherty reposted infographics and articles from the Crimson. “The least I can do is spread the word and tell people and at least try to raise awareness in this small way by reposting it and sharing my thoughts that this is, you know, deplorable and reaching out to my international friends.” Daugherty says she was thinking of her roommate and one of her best friends, an international student from Malaysia. “I had some peace of mind to know that, okay, people are doing things. People aren’t freaking out the way I am.”

In late June, a federal judge blocked the Donald Trump administration’s attempt to bar international students from Harvard. Daugherty read an article in the Crimson the day of. This time, she says she saw “maybe five” posts about the development. She had several conversations with friends who did not know about the update.

“There definitely was a gap,” she says. “Everybody knew about the first headline. It definitely seems like most people didn’t know about the second headline, except for those who were directly impacted by it.” Thinking back on it, Daugherty doesn’t know why she didn’t post anything on Instagram about the judge’s blockage herself, although she admits it would have been helpful to share the news online.

Khanal had an experience similar to Daugherty’s. When we spoke in October, coincidentally on the same day millions of people mobilized for a second round of No Kings protests, Khanal was surprised it was a national movement. “I thought it was a Boston thing,” he says, referring to a TikTok he remembers seeing out of the area during the first protests in June.

This dilemma is something Khanal reflects in his presentation about media consumption. In his outline, he dedicates a subsection to the algorithm’s influences: “Because people assume they are in control, they don’t question the repeated ideas and beliefs.”

In the survey published in January, which found that 72 percent of college students get their news from social media, just two in three students said they regularly check for accuracy, surveying for biases or cross-checking with other sources. And just half of students surveyed said they checked the information and identified sources before sharing it on their social media. From her decades teaching media classes, North is able to reaffirm that trend, one she says has risen in recent years, and vocalize another: “I believe that from what students say, they get a heads up about the news, they get sort of the headlines and the basic premise of the news from Instagram. And they get persuasive opinions from TikTok,” she says.

As Daugherty says, Instagram and TikTok can be helpful tools, expediting the spread of information, keeping her updated on headlines that might otherwise slip through the cracks. The other side of that cultural coin is that Lahtaw already knows he is susceptible to misinformation. “I can tell, like, our generation is going to be scammed in the future by AI and stuff,” he says.

Lahtaw says he sees many AI-generated videos on TikTok. In the age of AI deepfakes, it is getting harder to distinguish what’s real and what’s fabricated. In July, an AI-generated video of bunnies bouncing on a trampoline went viral, drawing over 240 million views and 25 million likes. Among the top-liked comments are “Please tell me this is real” and “This is the first time AI ever got me.” In August, an AI-generated video of orca trainer Jessica Radcliffe being killed was posted to TikTok. The hoax quickly went viral, and the fake footage circulated widely on social media. As with the bunny video, millions were deceived.

Khanal admitted he once posted an AI-generated image to TikTok as a joke. It was a picture of a forearm and, inked across it, a Roblox-related tattoo. “The most fake tattoo ever,” he says. “And people were genuinely believing me.” The post was seen nearly 190,000 times. And many of the comments were from enraged viewers, their reactions spurred by a seemingly genuine belief — even as Khanal had posted the TikTok with “#joke” in its description.

CollegeCollege junior Barnett Salle-Widelock studies political science at UCLA. He says he’s disillusioned by TikTok, which he says is “blatantly dedicated” to getting him to “doomscroll.” He finally uninstalled the app to avoid “doomscrolling” — a practice becoming more common among college students, who, on average, use social media for six or more hours daily. But Salle-Widelock still uses Instagram. Though most of his For You page real estate is basketball, golf, and memes, he gets the occasional video or infographic from The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, and his campus paper — publications he follows for his news. Sometimes, his feed will also show him viral headlines from the BBC and ABC News. Outside of Instagram and the rare subreddit, Salle-Widelock says he doesn’t seek out headlines, although he has an appreciation for traditional media. “I wish that I was a kind of worldly person that was sitting there with a newspaper every Sunday morning or something.” But why would he be? It’s easier to have the headlines picked and laid out for him, he says, accessible by the quick swipe of a thumb.

Toby Strawser, a junior at Lewis & Clark College, spends 15 to 20 minutes a day keeping himself up to date with the news. In the morning, he skims a daily newsletter from The New York Times and Letters from an American, a newsletter about the history behind current politics by historian Heather Cox Richardson (it is the third-largest US politics newsletter on Substack, behind The Free Press and The Bulwark). Outside of these emails and a subscription to a few newspapers like The Washington Post, every now and again, his family will have the news on — “NBC News or anything like that.” He has relatives working for the federal government, so he says his family is more inclined to stay engaged and active with news. Strawser also belongs to a college newsgathering niche that seems increasingly rare; he also subscribes to local news, particularly The Carmel Pine Cone, a weekly newspaper published in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, where he is from.

Harvard sophomore James Pippin similarly spends around 20 minutes a day getting his headlines from Apple News, reading articles between business and economics classes. “They’ve got a good spread on there,” he says. “It goes all across the spectrum, from CNN to Fox News.” He follows a few news sites on Instagram, including The New York Times, and says he tries not to take infographic activism too seriously. “I have made infographics before so I know how random and unreliable they can be. I’m a little cautious, but I think I’m probably a little more cautious than most of my peers.” Like Daugherty, Pippin learned of Trump’s proclamation to block international students from Harvard through an Instagram post. He went to Google and verified the news by reading an article from The New York Times. “If it sounds crazy, I try to vet it before I believe it.”

Headlines are expensive. Paywalls aren’t helping. According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in March, 83 percent of Americans say they have not paid for news in the past year. There are a few financial concessions for college students. Many colleges — including Harvard — provide free digital access to The New York Times through an “Academic Pass” program. And college papers, like the Daily Bruin and The Stanford Daily often offer national, global, and campus-centered headlines for free.

But are these select options more accessible, more attractive, than scrolling to have headlines handed out on social media? Salle-Widelock doesn’t think so. “It’s funny, because that feels wrong, and I feel like I should be doing my due diligence and doing my own research, but it’s like the curated feed and the ease of just having the headline picked out for you. It’s all right there. It’s all in one single site.”

Lahtaw suspects he’ll eventually outgrow social media scrolling and, in turn, source his news elsewhere. “As you grow up, you’re more involved in society,” he imagines. “I think it’s a thing. When you mature and you want to know what’s going on in the world, you become more interested.” When he graduates in four semesters with a degree in computer engineering, Lahtaw says he’ll turn to traditional media, metamorphosing into the kind of coffee-sipping, page-turning, “worldly person” that Salle-Widelock describes as obsolete for Gen Z. “I do think my generation neither wants to nor will ever consume news in that manner.”

Until then, the algorithm is still the appeal. Salle-Widelock has come to the conclusion that he, and the majority of his undergrad peers, get their news from social media for two primary reasons: The first, it’s a conscious, cost-efficient, and convenient choice guided by the dopamine rush of an algorithmic addiction. The second, maybe it’s Mark Zuckerberg “attacking” his brain. This was the running theme among the college students I spoke to for this story: Almost all of them were aware of the pitfalls of getting their news from social media, though none seemed interested in changing their habits.

Khanal’s presentation outlines the various and detrimental effects of algorithms, with subsections ranging from how they create “echo chambers and a lack of diversity” to their role in expediting the spread of fake news to “actively disorient the person’s view of the world.” But within his three pages of neatly organized, highlighted notes, there’s just one sentence that offers what can only be vaguely construed as some sort of solution, a recommendation to mediate this addiction to algorithms: “The next time you’re scrolling through your feed keep in mind that it’s meant to be addictive.”

But that precept is more of an afterthought most nights when Khanal scrolls on TikTok until he’s tired enough to fall asleep. Tucked into bed and absorbed by the phone’s glow, he scrolls through hundreds of videos — most of them memes. For every hundred or so of those comedic videos, “four or five” of them are news-oriented. Of that fraction, he says isn’t always sure what’s real or fake. But Khanal knows for certain that with the eventual, algorithmic swipe of his thumb, he will see a post from News Daddy.