TikTok, Facebook and the Fake News Blues

So it’s official – more of the rising young generation getting their news from social media, but fewer and fewer are believing it – many are avoiding it. 

This is among the findings of a new report by the Reuters Institute, in conjunction with the University of Oxford, that surveyed 93,000 online news users in 46 markets, across six continents, covering half of the world’s population.

How many people get their news from social media in 2023? 

Depending on your age, many of the findings may surprise you. The report found TikTok, Instagram and YouTube are growing in importance for news – especially in the southern hemisphere – while Facebook is losing its looks. In South Africa, 22% of users get their daily news from TikTok. In 2019, a mere 5% of 18 to 24-year-olds got their news from TikTok; In 2023 that number has soared to  38%.

The only problem is – where ever people get their news – fewer and fewer are believing it. In Spain, interest in all news has declined more than anywhere else. Fewer than one-in-five readers in Greece trust news making them the most sceptical consumers in the 46 countries researched.

The decline of print journalism 

Fewer and fewer people are paying for news too. It appears only the upmarket newspapers can squeeze a few pennies out of online readers. Even then, the survey said the cost-of-living crisis has eaten into news subscriptions with 39% of readers saying they had cancelled or renegotiated this year. News organisations are resorting to discounts to cling on to their readers.    

As for the teatime TV news that previous generations grew up with, forget it! More than half of respondents say they switch off the news when it comes on. Many find it too depressing; also, they want solutions rather than endless reports of problems. 

“Turning my back on the news is the only way I feel I can cope sometimes,” a 42-year-old British woman told researchers. 

Grim stuff; but, as a journalist, the fact that depressed me the most was the proliferation of fake news. It makes me sick. Professional journalists spend their lives working hard to distinguish truth from lies. It appears to me that – these days – that people make careers and gain millions of followers by merely sitting there writing reckless, thoughtless, lies. It is lazy, it is low, it is destructive 

This publication will not countenance that. We will seek out the credible sources on stories, we will cut the wheat from the chaff and tell it like it is.