MW Most people now get their news from social media. But many say they dislike it and are tuning out.
By Lukas I. Alpert
Audiences been increasingly getting news from social media for years - but many are now disillusioned, creating yet another challenge for media organizations
A new study shows that the percentage of people who say they dislike the news they see on social media and have stopped reading it entirely is on the rise.
A long-running mantra in the media industry has been to make sure your news can be found wherever the reader is.
For years, that meant on social-media platforms, where more than half of consumers say they now get most of their news. But readers also say they are increasingly unhappy with the information they are getting there, and are starting to tune it out.
That is proving to be yet another big challenge to the business models of media organizations, which have seen steep declines in traffic being sent their way from social-media platforms and from Google's $(GOOGL)$ $(GOOG)$ search engine in recent years.
A new report on the media landscape by the Reuters Institute revealed that for the first time, social-media and video platforms like YouTube were the most common sources of news for most people across the world.
The survey, which polled over 96,000 people in 48 countries, found that 54% of respondents said they had read or watched news on those sorts of platforms over the previous week, compared to 52% who said they watched news on TV and 51% who said they read it on a news website or app. Newspapers and radio trailed distantly behind, with artificial-intelligence chatbots beginning to make their way up the list.
Both TV and news sites saw drops of 12 percentage points over the past five years, while the cohort that named social media as their primary new source increased.
All of this is happening against a backdrop in which referral traffic to news sites from Facebook (META) has fallen by nearly 70% in the past five years, according to the Neiman Journalism Lab. Google search traffic similarly declined 34% between December 2024 and December 2025, according to data from Chartbeat.
At the same time, the Reuters survey showed that the percentage of people who complained about the quality of the news they were getting was far higher among consumers of social-media and video platforms than those of TV news or news websites.
The rise in people getting their news on social media has also coincided with an increase in the number who say they don't like the news they see and now have "little or no interest in it," to the point where they have stopped consuming it at all. In 2021, that figure came in at 16%; it now stands at 25%, the survey found.
The percentage of those who said they remain "extremely interested" in news fell to 43% from 59% over the same time frame, the survey showed.
"A small but significant minority in every country say they do not use any news sources at all," said Richard Fletcher, the deputy director of the Reuters Institute. "It points to the structural decline of news use in general, and not just the rise and fall of specific sources."
Benjamin Toff, author of "Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism" and a journalism professor at the University of Minnesota, said these declines can be attributed partly to dissatisfaction with the quality of news reporting and how it is being presented.
But he said it also comes as the development of news consumption habits has been in decline and as social-media platforms have been deemphasizing news.
"You are seeing this as referrals from social-media platforms to news sites are evaporating, so a lot of what people actually are seeing are secondhand sources like commentary, which can be misleading or highly slanted," Toff said.
Jim Friedlich, CEO of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, which supports local news organizations around the U.S., said these changes in news consumption habits are part of a much larger trend that started with the rise of smartphones.
"Over time, global news use has shifted from active to passive consumption. Increasingly, news finds us in our feeds, on email or through text alerts, whether or not we sought it out in the first place," he said. "It's no surprise that the majority of consumers report that they get their news on social media or other passive channels, and that they don't like what they see."
-Lukas I. Alpert
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 16, 2026 16:53 ET (20:53 GMT)
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