SOCIAL MEDIA THE PRIMARY NEWS SOURCE, TRUST AT NEW LOW

The way people consume news has fundamentally shifted. For the first time since tracking began, social media and video networks like YouTube have overtaken every other source as the primary place people get their news.

54% of people now say they get news from social media and video networks, according to the Reuters Institute's annual digital news report. That puts platform-driven discovery ahead of TV (52%) and publisher websites (51%), the two channels that have dominated for decades. The margin is narrow, but the direction is clear: the old gatekeepers are being bypassed at scale.

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This is the first year social video has claimed the top spot in the report's rankings. The finding reflects not a single shocking jump but a steady erosion of direct-to-publisher traffic and a corresponding dependence on algorithmic feeds. For publishers that built their business models around home page visits and email newsletters, the signal is unmistakable.

TRUST HITS NEW FLOOR

The same report carries a darker number. Only 37% of people say they trust most news most of the time, the lowest level since Reuters began measuring trust in 2015. The decline is not subtle. At a time when more news is flowing through platforms with minimal editorial oversight, the audience is increasingly sceptical of the product itself.

The trust deficit is even starker in the United States. There, only 25% of people say they trust most news most of the time, far below the global average. Gallup's separate polling, released in October 2025, put the figure at 28%, a record low for that survey and down from 31% the year before and 40% five years ago. Two different methodologies, same conclusion: American audiences have never been more distrustful of the institutions that produce and distribute news.

AI HAS ENTERED CHAT

AI chatbots are still a minor channel, but they are growing. 10% of people now use AI tools for news consumption, up from 7% a year ago. The numbers are small, but the behaviour around them is revealing.

When people click out of an AI-generated answer to a news question, they do it for different reasons than they do with search or social. 44% click out to verify whether the news is correct, compared to 36% for search and 33% for social. 43% click out to learn more about the source of the information, compared to 35% for search and 34% for social. The implication is clear: people treat AI answers as something that requires active fact-checking, even more so than the already-suspect results from a search engine or a social feed.

The figure for clicking out simply for more detail is lower for AI (51%) than for search (59%) or social (60%), suggesting that users see AI as providing a relatively complete answer, but one that may not be trustworthy. That is a dangerous place for the news ecosystem to sit. If the audience expects AI summaries to be both comprehensive and unreliable, the value of the summary itself collapses.

passive consumption, active consequences

12% of people now get news only by bumping into it on social platforms, double the 2020 level. That group does not intend to seek out news. It arrives algorithmically, by way of a friend's share, a trending tag, or a recommended video. They never visit a publisher's site. They never see a homepage. They may not know or care which organisation produced the story.

For publishers, that audience is virtually unreachable outside the platform's terms. For the audience, it means the news they see is shaped entirely by engagement signals rather than editorial judgment. The consequences for public understanding of complex issues are hard to overstate. A population that only encounters news algorithmically is a population whose understanding of the world is mediated by whatever the platform's model decides is most likely to hold attention.

Media brands are becoming more diluted and less relevant, maybe even on their way out. The combination of falling trust and rising platform dependence creates a feedback loop. People trust news less, so they rely less on institutional brands. They get more news from platforms where the incentives favour speed and engagement over accuracy. They trust those sources even less, and the cycle continues.

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THERE IS NO SINGLE FIX

Better transparency from AI providers, clearer source labelling on platforms, and a renewed investment in direct audience relationships could all help. But the report makes one thing plain: the old model of news as a product people actively seek out is giving way to news as a thing that washes over you while you scroll. And the audience is not sure it trusts what it sees.