Influencers and celebrities, better sources of information than journalists in the eyes of young people? This is what a global report tends to show, which points to the growing importance of the TikTok social network as a channel for accessing information.
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“The younger generations, who have grown up with social networks, often pay more attention to influencers or celebrities than to journalists, even when it comes to information”, underlines the 2023 report from the Reuters institute. for the study of journalism, attached to the English University of Oxford.
This annual report on digital information, published on Wednesday, is based on online surveys conducted by the YouGov company among 94,000 people in 46 countries.
Highlight this year: the majority of users of TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram say they pay attention to influencers or celebrities when it comes to news. Conversely, on Facebook (which, like Instagram, belongs to the American group Meta) or Twitter, less used by young people, journalists play the leading roles.
Asked by AFP, the main author of the report, Nic Newman, cites the example of the young Englishman Matt Welland, who reviews current affairs or daily life on TikTok for his 2.8 million subscribers. .
Facebook unscrews
“It can also be a celebrity talking about a news story,” says Newman, referring to English footballer Marcus Rashford’s 2020 digital campaign for free meals for poor children.
Because for the TikTok generation, the term “information” has a much broader meaning than in its traditional meaning, where we first think of politics or international relations.
For these young people, news “means any new thing, all sectors combined: sport, entertainment, gossip, news, culture, arts, technology, etc. “, noted the Reuters institute in a separate study last year.
This seizure of power by influencers is the most spectacular effect of an upheaval in the hierarchy between social networks: the traditional ones like Facebook are losing ground, outdated by those based on video, like TikTok, YouTube (which belongs to the Alphabet group, parent company of the American giant Google), Instagram and Snapchat.
It is to the latter that young people turn, including for information.
In 2023, only 28% of respondents say they access information via Facebook, compared to 42% in 2016.
This is partly due to its “disengagement” from the news sector, which no longer seems to be a strategic priority, and partly because video-based networks are “increasingly capturing the attention of the most youth “.
Among them, the Chinese TikTok is “the one with the strongest growth”: it is used by 20% of 18-24 year olds as a source of access to information (5 points more than in 2022).
Reviews of a Nobel
Frequently accused in the West of being a tool of influence, even espionage, for Beijing (which it defends itself from), TikTok is, according to the study, particularly used in Asia, Latin America and Africa.
More broadly, due to the habits of the younger generations born under social networks, “our dependence on these intermediaries” in access to information “continues to increase”.
It is less and less frequent for the public to arrive directly on a news site: most of the time, they first go through a social network, despite the risk of misinformation.
Considered a reference tool for analyzing changes in the media, this report was however criticized by the Filipino journalist Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace Prize 2021.
In remarks reported by the British daily The Guardian, she challenged the methodology of the study, which establishes an index of confidence in the media, country by country.
This methodology does not take into account the “misinformation” of authoritarian governments about independent media, which can damage the image that respondents have of the latter, she said.
According to the Nobel Prize, the poor rating of the media she founded, Rappler, in the 2022 edition of the report served the hostile argument of the Philippine regime against him.
In response to these criticisms, the director of the Reuters Institute, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, judged that the “attacks” against Ms. Ressa and her colleagues proceeded from a “distortion” of the report and praised “the important work” of Rappler.