TikTok has emerged as the fastest growing social network used by young adults for consuming news, according to a study released on Tuesday.
The China-owned short video app was used by 20% of 18-to 24-year-olds for news, up five percentage points from last year, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism said in its annual Digital News 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 Institute director Rasmus Nielsen said in the report, which is based on an online survey of roughly 94,000 adults, conducted in 46 markets including the US.
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The number of people globally who initially access news through a website or app dropped by 10 points since 2018, the report found.
Less than a third of the survey’s respondents said that having stories selected for them based on their previous consumption is a good way to get news, a 6-point decline from 2016, when the survey last asked the question.
Yet people still slightly preferred to have their news chosen by algorithms than by editors or journalists, the study found.
Across markets, 56% of people said they worried about identifying the difference between real and fake news on the internet – up 2 percentage points from last year.
Falling trust in news
The survey found that 48% of people said they were very or extremely interested in news, down from 63% in 2017.
Fewer than half the survey respondents expressed much interest in news at all, down sharply from 6 out of 10 in 2017.
Trust in the news fell by 2 percentage points in the last year, reversing gains made in many countries at the peak of the coronavirus pandemic.
On average, 40% of people said they trust most news most of the time. The United States saw a 6-point increase in trust in news, to 32%, but remained among the lowest in the survey.
Meanwhile, audiences paid more attention to celebrities, influencers, and social media personalities than journalists on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat.
- Reuters, with additional editing by Vishakha Saxena
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