How TikTok Is Reshaping What It Means to Search

What changes when algorithms, peers, and platforms shape how information is found

Much of the anxiety surrounding young people’s use of TikTok and other social media platforms centers on questions of credibility, misinformation, and attention. These concerns are understandable, particularly for parents and educators who have spent years trying to help young people develop responsible research habits in an increasingly complex information environment. Yet focusing primarily on what students might be doing wrong risks missing a more consequential shift: the transformation of search itself, and with it, the assumptions that underlie how we teach media literacy.

For many adults, searching still carries a familiar structure. A question leads to keywords, keywords produce results, and those results are evaluated through visible markers of authority such as authorship, citations, or institutional affiliation. This model has shaped information literacy instruction for decades and continues to inform how responsible research is imagined in classrooms and at home. Increasingly, however, research suggests that this model no longer reflects how inquiry actually unfolds for many young people, particularly as platforms like TikTok become central sites for learning, exploration, and sensemaking.

A 2025 study of college students’ everyday information habits offers an important insight here.

Many students did not describe themselves as actively “searching” on TikTok at all. Instead, they experienced the platform as anticipating their interests and delivering relevant content through its recommendation system, making discovery feel intuitive rather than intentional. Information surfaced through scrolling, not querying, and learning blended seamlessly into entertainment and social interaction in ways that often feel responsive to students, even as the underlying systems remain difficult for adults to see or understand.

This helps explain why TikTok-based searching feels appealing in ways that parents and teachers may not have considered. Information arrives through real people speaking directly to the camera, demonstrating processes, narrating lived experience, and responding to others’ questions in real time. Knowledge is visual and contextual rather than abstract or text-heavy, and it circulates socially rather than privately. Comment sections, stitches, and duets allow information to be discussed, challenged, and reinforced in public, transforming search into a collective activity rather than an individual one.

These social dynamics also reshape how credibility is assessed. Rather than relying primarily on institutional authority, many students draw on experiential credibility, asking who has lived something, who can show it, and who explains it clearly. Brookbank’s findings complicate the assumption that this approach reflects a lack of critical judgment. Students expressed skepticism toward overtly political or health-related content and described cross-checking information they perceived as high stakes. What differs is not the presence of evaluation, but the signals that carry weight within platform-based systems, where visibility, repetition, and social feedback play a central role.

Research by Adelhardt and Eberle further situates TikTok as a peer-driven learning environment in which knowledge is constructed through remix, repetition, and community engagement. Authority in these spaces is relational, emerging through interaction rather than credentials alone. For educators and parents accustomed to more hierarchical models of knowledge, this redistribution of authority can feel disorienting, particularly when the systems governing visibility and amplification remain largely invisible.

Within this environment, where search and credibility are increasingly shaped through social interaction, comment sections serve as an important site of meaning-making. Young people read comments to understand how others interpret a video, to identify agreement or disagreement, and to see which perspectives gain support or pushback. This practice reflects a form of social inquiry, where credibility is assessed through patterns of response, the presence of counterarguments, and the visibility of lived experience. Even when young people do not contribute directly, they are actively observing how ideas circulate and how communities respond to them.

Seen this way, reading comment threads becomes part of how young people navigate a complex and fragmented information landscape. It is one mechanism among many for assessing alignment, credibility, and perspective in spaces where traditional markers of authority are less visible. For media literacy education, this underscores the need to help students understand how social feedback, platform design, and visibility shape which voices are amplified and which remain unseen, and how those dynamics influence what feels trustworthy over time.

These shifts present a challenge for traditional approaches to critical media literacy, many of which were developed for environments defined by more stable texts, more transparent authorship, and relatively neutral – albeit commercial - systems of information retrieval. In social media contexts, however, platforms actively organize attention, personalize information, and shape what appears relevant or trustworthy over time. Teaching students to evaluate content without examining these underlying systems leaves a significant gap in how power, influence, and credibility actually operate.

When inquiry moves from search engines to social feeds, critical media literacy must expand beyond content analysis to include reflection on platform design, algorithmic personalization, and the social dynamics that shape knowledge production. Helping students examine how their feeds evolve, how engagement influences visibility, and how credibility is constructed through interaction allows them to navigate these environments with greater awareness.

For parents and teachers, the task is not to dismiss these platforms or attempt to pull young people back toward older models of searching, but to recognize that young people are already conducting inquiry within systems that feel intuitive, social, and responsive. Meeting them where they already search means helping them understand how meaning, truth, and authority are produced within these spaces, and how those processes differ from the systems adults were taught to trust.

If we want young people to become informed digital citizens, media literacy education must evolve alongside the environments they inhabit. This looks like equipping young people with the tools to understand how knowledge is shaped, circulated, and legitimized within them, even when those processes are designed to remain unseen.

This is the work I support with schools, educators, and youth-serving organizations: sustained professional learning that helps adults make sense of how young people’s information environments are changing. By grounding media literacy in research, lived classroom realities, and the systems that shape digital life, this work focuses on building shared language and practical strategies for teaching critical inquiry in a media landscape where search, learning, and social connection are increasingly intertwined.