TikTok is now the most popular website in the world, by one measure, and as such its influence on how young people see and think about themselves is attracting ever more attention. I am an economist, so I would like to focus on a considerably narrower subject: what TikTok's videos say about how young people see and think about economics. The news - for my profession, not necessarily for TikTok - is not good.
For the purposes of this experiment, I typed "economics" into the TikTok search bar and simply watched what came up. Of course my feed was governed by the site's algorithm, which is not transparent, but it is reasonable to assume that on average it guides users to videos that are engaged with, liked and widely shared.
I watched a video of a woman loudly sighing in relief as a caption explains she has just dropped her economics class. Likes: more than 22,000. Then there was one mocking the idea of being an economics major, calling it another religion and suggesting the demand for economist friends is quite low. It had more than 34,000 likes.
Source:Reuters
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