The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is the great Eddy Hurcombe, presenting a paper co-authored with Anand Badola. This explores how audiences engage with influencer-style news on TikTok and Instagram.
The rise of such news influencers is a sign of the continuing crisis of journalism, and particularly its loss of younger audiences in favour of other voices. Some of these are explicitly ideological, including deeply problematic far-right actors. In response, major news organisations are also employing news influencers who employ similar content aesthetics and create more informal news content. But how are audiences engaging with such content?
This project selected 16 journalists from news outlets in the US, UK, and Australia, and collected nearly 1,000 videos from TikTok and Instagram between November 2024 and April 2025. These were coded for topic and format, though it must be noted that some of these influencers were a great deal more prolific than others, skewing overall patterns in the data.
Personal content, news production, US politics, crime, and US elections were key topics for such TikTok videos, but likes don’t quite follow that distribution; on Instagram, similar content distributions apply, but the few videos on language politics, arts, fact-checking, local events, and civic issues received disproportionately more likes than those main categories.
Reports, explainers, personal content, and Behind the Scenes content were major formats on both platforms, with explainers and reports receiving a great deal more likes especially on Instagram. The most popular video on Instagram debunked the idea that fact-checking was left-wing, while the most popular TikTok video was about the US government’s pressure to break up TikTok.
The period under study had a particularly large amount of news events, but overall it is notable that there was a particular focus on ‘hard news’ topics in these videos; concerns about the softening of journalism through influencers might be overstated, therefore. There were interesting divergences between content supply and content likes patterns, and it seems that some formats (like explainers on TikTok) are especially popular with audiences. There is a need to follow up on this study by actually talking to both journalists and audiences about their content preferences, too.
