A new report has found that 55 percent of TikTok and Snapchat users, as well as 52 percent of Instagram users, get their information on the news from social media personalities. Conversely, only between 33 and 42 percent of users on these platforms get their news from the mainstream media or journalists, per AFP.
The numbers were based on interviews with 94,000 people across 46 different countries around the world. The study was carried out by Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which is a part of Britain’s University of Oxford.
The report stated: “While mainstream journalists often lead conversations around news in Twitter and Facebook, they struggle to get attention in newer networks like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok.”
The report also highlighted people such as Britain’s Matt Welland, who apparently talks about current events to his 2.8 million subscribers on TikTok. The lead author of the study also mentioned that celebrities have also gained ground on these platforms, such as Marcus Rashford, who campaigned to get free school meals for children in poor families, per the report.
Reuters Institute Director Rasmus Nielsen said in the report: “There are no reasonable grounds for expecting that those born in the 2000s will suddenly come to prefer old-fashioned websites, let alone broadcast and print, simply because they grow older.”
Reuters reported that overall trust in the news has fallen by two percentage points over the past year, which is a reverse trend from other countries during the Covid-19 pandemic. About 40 percent of people say that they trust the news most of the time. Though the US has made gains in this area, just 32 percent of Americans have trust in the news, which still remains among the lowest recorded in the study.
Across the different markets, over half of the people say that they have a hard time distinguishing between what is real and fake news. The study also found that 48 percent of people are “very” or “extremely” interested in the news, which is down from 63 percent in 2017.
