The UK Media Management Agency ( Ofcom) said that young people in this country are increasingly "turning their backs" on traditional news sites and switching to reading news on social networking platforms such as Instagram, TikTok or YouTube.
Ofcom's latest report has pointed to the difference in news consumption across across age groups in the UK.
Traditional news sources are increasingly being replaced, the Instagram platform has become the most popular news source among adolescents for the first time with more than 29%, while YouTube (under Alphabet) and TikTok are also trusted by about 28% of young people.
Among the above platforms, TikTok has achieved remarkable growth, with half of the users following news on this platform aged 16 to 24. TikTok users also receive more news from people they follow on the platform rather than from news production units.
Ofcom's Strategy and Research Director, Yih- choung Teh, said: "Youth today does not tend to read newspapers or watch news on TV, but instead they like to update by scrolling through social media news sources."
Notably, according to Ofcom, only 30% of survey respondents in the 12-15 age group believe that news on TikTok is reliable, despite the popularity of the video sharing platform. Meanwhile, nearly half of YouTube and Twitter users trust the news content they watch on these apps.
The report also pointed out that not all social media platforms are successful. The rate of adolescents using Facebook to search for news has been declining continuously since 2018, continuing to decrease from 27% in 2021 to only 22% this year.
