Young people turn away from news as social platforms dominate

The Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report found that social media and video networks have, for the first time, become more popular than television and news organizations’ own websites and apps as sources of news across 48 markets on six continents. The shift is most pronounced among younger audiences, where more than half of 18- to 24-year-olds said social media, video networks and AI chatbots are their main way of getting news.

That is more than a media-business problem. When younger people stop seeking out news directly, public institutions lose one of their most reliable channels to voters, patients, parents and first-time taxpayers. The report said 42% of respondents globally now sometimes or often avoid the news, up 2 percentage points from last year, while global trust in news fell to 37%, a record low in the report’s framing.

Jim Egan, the report’s lead author, called the findings “quite unsettling” and said journalism still matters even as audiences drift away. The report’s central warning is not simply that people are changing habits, but that the information ecosystem is being re-routed through feeds, algorithms and short-form video, where news is encountered incidentally rather than through deliberate choice.

The United States stood out for its own trust collapse. Overall news trust fell 5 points in 2026 to a new low for the country, and only 25% of Americans said they trust the news most of the time. Reuters Institute also said 16% of people under 35 used AI chatbots for news in the last week, a sign that the next wave of information access may be even less tied to established publishers.

News organizations are already losing ground inside their own products. Reuters Institute said video consumption on publishers’ own sites and apps fell 5 percentage points from 2025 and 10 points since 2021, underscoring how quickly attention has shifted to third-party platforms. The report, first published annually in 2012 and now in its fifteenth edition, captures a longer pattern than a single bad year: the move from newsroom-controlled distribution to platform-controlled discovery.

That carries direct consequences for civic life. Election campaigns, health agencies and emergency officials can no longer assume that accurate information will reach younger audiences through traditional channels, and publishers face a harder task of rebuilding habits in a market where people spend four to five hours a day on smartphones. The report’s message is stark: if news increasingly arrives only when platforms choose to deliver it, accountability becomes harder to sustain.