Social media becomes world’s leading news source, report warns

News consumers around the world are now turning more to social media and video platforms than traditional outlets for information, a respected report said Tuesday, warning that old-style business models are under threat.

The year 2026 marks "a significant milestone: for the first time, social media and video network consumption is now ahead of other news sources as the most widely used source of news globally", at 54 per cent, wrote Jim Egan, lead author of the report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

The annual report from the institute, attached to the University of Oxford, is a closely watched tracker of trends reshaping the news media.

Researchers based their findings on online surveys of almost 100,000 people in 48 countries, run early this year by pollsters YouGov.

This year's edition found 54 per cent of respondents said they got news from social media or video platforms in the week before the survey – rising to 56 per cent if AI chatbots like ChatGPT were included.

That outstripped the 52 per cent who referenced TV news, 51 per cent for newspaper apps or websites, and 21 per cent for radio.

Shrinking revenues

While it was the first time new platforms topped the old in the average of the global survey, individual countries had already passed the turning point.

In some countries, though, notably in Europe, traditional media websites and apps remain ahead for now.

"It is better to think of this more as a drift rather than a shift, but it is nevertheless an important moment," Egan wrote.

Across the global survey, three out of 10 respondents said social media or video platforms were their main source of news.

Among 18–24-year-olds, the proportion rose to half.

Different social networks also breed different usage patterns.

Most of the respondents visited X or YouTube specifically to find news.

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But on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, users were likelier to stumble across news while doing something else.

Television remained the leading news source only among 45–54-year-olds and over-55s.

The responses about traditional media apps and websites were also grim reading, with none of the age tranches surveyed saying they were their first port of call for news.

"This has obvious implications in terms of prospects for audience reach, engagement, and for monetisation potential," wrote Egan, a former senior executive at the BBC.

The scale of the challenge in finding the revenues to pay for reporting is clear from the fact that just 17 per cent of respondents said they pay for information online.

Meanwhile internet giants such as Google and Meta have captured a giant share of the advertising market – at the expense of traditional media.

Loss of confidence

The 180-page report reinforces large-scale trends acting on the media for years, including the growing appetite for video content, increasing power for individual news content creators, and loss of confidence in traditional media.

That last measure reached an all-time low, with just 37 per cent of respondents saying they trust "most news most of the time".

People are also increasingly turning to AI chatbots for news, which had been the focus of last year's Reuters Institute report.

Some 10 per cent of respondents said they used chatbots for news weekly, up from seven per cent last year.

"How to respond to the rapid development and diffusion of generative AI is the biggest 360-degree challenge for today's news leaders and policymakers," Egan wrote.

More broadly, he noted "marked volatility in many of the indicators" tracked in the report, against a backdrop of increased geopolitical uncertainty.

"Some of this year's report makes for unsettling reading, but it is an especially unsettled time both for the news media sector and for the world at large," Egan wrote.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)