More Australians now access their news via social media than through traditional outlets. For young Australians, the shift is sharper still. The 2025 Digital News Report confirms they are increasingly drawn to video news on TikTok and Instagram.
This is where political views are being formed. In The Age, former Liberal Party MP Lucy Wicks recounts a moment that brought this home. During a car ride, her nearly-17-year-old son Oscar told her that “socialism sounds pretty good.” Where had he learned about it? TikTok. Wicks now asks whether the party she once served is reaching that generation at all.
Only 24% of Australians have received any news literacy education. Compare that to Finland, which embedded media literacy in its national curriculum in the 1990s. Finnish children start at age three, building skills to spot bias, verify facts and understand how media shapes perception. Other Scandinavian countries are following.
Now more than ever, with the fog of AI-fuelled misinformation thickening, our young people need media literacy to balance the meme-tinged bites they absorb on TikTok and elsewhere.
“As the man said, for every complex problem there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong.” — Umberto Eco.
These days those all-too-simple solutions run wild in 15-second grabs on TikTok.
The concerns are real and should not be dismissed. What’s missing is the capacity to weed out hollow memes and instead engage deeply in finding solutions. That gap is not inevitable. Finland proved as much three decades ago.