Where People Actually Get Their News Now
The Shift Behind the Headline
Reuters points to four platforms driving this change: WhatsApp, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. All four have seen steady growth in news use, while TV and news websites have fallen by double digits since 2020. The report also flags something newer: AI chatbots are starting to eat into how people find news, too. Weekly use for news has grown from 7% to 10% globally, and reaches 16% among people under 35.
What’s driving people onto these platforms isn’t just convenience. Reuters describes it as a shift toward watching rather than reading, and toward “a wider range of sources and voices.” That’s the polite way of saying traditional outlets are no longer the main gatekeepers of what counts as news. Independent creators, commentators, and video-first accounts increasingly are.
Trust Hasn’t Followed Attention
Here’s the twist: people are spending more time getting news from social platforms, but they don’t fully trust what they find there. Overall trust in news fell to 37% globally in 2026, the lowest level Reuters has recorded since it started tracking the measure in 2015. Trust in news specifically on social media sits at just 22%, and trust in AI chatbot answers is even lower, at 20%.
That gap matters. Audiences are increasingly getting their information from a channel they’re simultaneously skeptical of. It suggests trust isn’t being built by platforms as a whole, it’s being built, or lost, creator by creator, account by account, inside the feed. A person might distrust “social media” in the abstract while trusting a specific voice they’ve followed for years. That distinction is exactly where brand relevance now lives.
Why This Is a Brand Problem, Not Just a Media One
It’s tempting to file this under “media trends” and move on. But the implication runs straight into brand strategy, for one simple reason: if news, opinion, and cultural context are increasingly formed inside social feeds first, then so is everything a brand cares about, reputation, relevance, and trust.
Consider what that means in practice. A brand’s presence in a category, a competitor controversy, a piece of breaking industry news, audiences are now more likely to encounter and form an opinion about all of it through a creator’s take in their feed than through a press release or a news segment. By the time a story reaches a “traditional” channel, a meaningful chunk of the audience has already made up its mind based on what an independent voice said about it first.
That reorders the sequence brands have long assumed. Cultural relevance used to be shaped by earned media and then amplified on social. Now it’s frequently the reverse: shaped inside social feeds first, with traditional coverage following or reacting to it.
What This Means in Practice
A few shifts follow directly from this. Creator relationships are now part of reputation management, not just marketing. If independent voices are shaping how a brand’s news gets framed before it reaches anyone else, then who those voices are and what relationship a brand has with them matters as much as any press strategy.
Monitoring social conversation also matters as much as monitoring press coverage. A brand can have a clean traditional media profile and still be losing the narrative inside the feeds where a majority of its audience, especially anyone under 35, is actually forming opinions.
Low trust in the channel doesn’t mean low influence. The 22% trust figure for social media news might read as reassuring, but it says nothing about impact. People act on what they see in feeds constantly, whether or not they’d call it “trustworthy” if asked directly. Discounting a channel because trust scores are low ignores how much influence it still exerts.
And finally, specific voices matter more than platforms. Reuters’ trust data is about social media as a category. It says nothing about the individual creators inside it, some of whom carry more credibility with their audience than most news brands do. Brands need a view of who those specific people are in their category, not just a general social monitoring dashboard.
Final Thoughts
Social media has overtaken television and news websites as the world’s leading source of news, but trust hasn’t caught up with that shift, and won’t necessarily need to for influence to keep growing. For brands, the takeaway isn’t just “invest more in social.” It’s that trust, relevance, and reputation are now being built or broken inside social feeds before they ever reach a traditional channel, which means the creators shaping those feeds deserve the same strategic attention a brand once reserved for press.
Want help building a strategy that reaches people where they are? Get in touch and let’s map out where your brand’s story is really being shaped.