The number of people worldwide, which is updated through a website or application has decreased by ten percent units from 2018 and younger age groups prefer to access news through social media, according to a report released yesterday. Users are more interested in celebrities, the influencers and persons appearing on social media in relation to journalists, on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat, as reported by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in its annual Digital News Report.

TikTok is the fastest growing social media network featured in the report and used for information from 20% of users aged 18 to 24, percentage increased by five percentage points compared to last year. Fewer than half of respondents expressed a great interest in news overall, down from 6 in 10 in 2017.

“There’s no reasonable reason to expect that those born in the 2000s will suddenly start preferring old-fashioned websites, much less print and TV news, just because they’re getting older,” writes the director of the Reuters Institute in the report, Rasmus Nielsen. The report was based on an online survey of nearly 94,000 adults in 46 countries including the US.

Fewer than a third of respondents said that a good way to stay informed is by selecting news based on their previous traffic; a percentage reduced by six percentage points compared to 2016, when this survey last asked this question. However, citizens prefer to have the news they read selected by algorithms rather than editors or journalists.

Trust in the news has fallen by two percentage points over the past year, reversing gains seen in many countries at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. Average, 40% of respondents said they trust most news Most of the time. The US has recorded a six percentage point increase in its trust in the news, reaching 32% but remains among the lowest in the ranking.

56% of citizens across media markets say they are concerned about how to tell the difference between real and fake news online — up two percentage points from last year. The research found that 48% of respondents said they are very or extremely interested in newsa percentage reduced compared to the 63% it was in 2017.

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism is funded by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Thomson Reuters.