In the suburbs of Madrid, four friends create videos summarizing the news viewed millions of times on TikTok where, like other young people, they have renewed the way of getting information and distanced themselves from traditional media. Less than three years after its creation, their ac2ality account is followed by 4.3 million people, a number of subscribers well above that of most major media outlets on this social network.
The idea emerged when two of them, then students in London, faced between 2016 and 2020 an overflow of information on Brexit. “We were reading a bunch of[newspaper]articles, but we couldn’t get a more general understanding” of the subject, says Gabriela Campbell, a 26-year-old biotechnology graduate. Whether “It was difficult for us, it must have been for others”she explains.
With the mantra of “translate newspapers” in one-minute videos and without pretending to call themselves journalists, they decided in June 2020, with two other friends, to create ac2ality at a time when the Chinese social network TikTok, with its short and vertical videos, spread to a lightning speed among young people.
According to a report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, attached to the University of Oxford, ac2ality is now the leading Spanish-language news account on TikTok.
Created in minutes using a smartphone, a circular lamp and some rudimentary footage, their video chronicling the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 has been viewed by over 17 million people. time.
“Speaking to a Generation”
Social networks, in particular YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, have become the first sources of information among young people according to various studies, such as that of the British regulator Ofcom dating from July.
If media created “by young people and for young people” on the networks have already become heavyweights, such as Brut in France, “from now on, these are no longer necessarily companies” who are behind news accounts, but “mere individuals” able “to reach a gigantic number of people” thanks to the recommendations of the algorithms, explains to AFP Nic Newman, researcher at the Reuters institute.
In France, HugoDécrypte is one of the most followed news accounts. He managed to interview Emmanuel Macron or Bill Gates. Its founder, the youtubeur Hugo Travers, 25, claims, in an interview with AFP, to know “talking to a generation” part of which “took up” when she “followed the news in more traditional media”.
The popularity of these accounts on the networks, “where the media fight for our attention” in a context of“infobesity”lies in their short, didactic, creative formats, and their lighter tone, observes Susana Pérez Soler, professor of digital journalism and researcher at the Ramón Llull University in Barcelona.
While warning that it is, in the case of ac2ality, a “summary” news and “no journalism”who is asking “investigative work […] and verification of the veracity of sources”.
The millions of subscribers to these accounts sometimes arouse the envy of major media seeking to renew their audience.
Approached by a large Spanish group, ac2ality has so far preferred to keep its distance, its co-founder Daniela Álvarez explaining that “one of the keys” of his success “is not to be associated with media”which are sometimes “politicized” or have procedures that are too cumbersome.
“What is at stake there is not necessarily the means that you have, the group, if you are installed in the middle […] that’s what you bring”says, for his part, Hugo Travers.
Other journalists, employed by the media, create their own content on the networks in parallel, such as the Briton Sophia Smith Galer, who has more than 130 million views on her TikTok account, where she talks about sexual health in particular.
“I am my own editor-in-chief” on TikTok and I “don’t have to convince a temple guardian editor that a topic is important”explains this journalist at Vice News of 28 years, who believes that the subjects “important” for young people, like those she addresses, are not covered enough by the traditional media.
In some cases, however, 15-30 year olds still turn to traditional media, nuance Nic Newman. “When you talk about a subject like Ukraine, a lot of young people don’t want it presented to them by 18-year-olds, but by people who are in a war zone and really know what they are talking about”.