Who U.S. Adults Follow on TikTok

A new Pew Research Center analysis of the accounts Americans follow on TikTok highlights the centrality of internet-native content creators, prominent influencers and traditional celebrities on the popular short-form video platform. It also finds that users choose to follow far more accounts that post about pop culture and entertainment than those posting about news or politics. Broadly, they follow lots of creators and influencers who have risen to their current level of prominence via social media, as well as traditional celebrities. Together, these groups are around half of all the accounts followed by U.S. adults on the platform and the vast majority of the 100 accounts followed by the largest share of U.S. adults. But they follow very few politicians, civic actors or traditional media outlets and journalists. Each of these groups makes up less than half of 1% of all the accounts we examined. And the typical U.S. adult on TikTok follows no accounts in each of these categories. Americans on TikTok also follow a large number of accounts that do not fit cleanly in any of these categories. These are largely personal accounts that have relatively few followers and post infrequently, if ever. Some 38% of all accounts followed by U.S. adults on the site fit this description.