Your editorial on disinformation (17 February) highlights a great challenge, but of arguably greater importance are the sources of news young people use. In a 2022 study, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford provided quantitative evidence on the growth of social media as a news source for 18- to 24-year-olds. TikTok as a source had increased fivefold between 2020 and 2022, and YouTube stabilised its share of young readers in Asia, the fastest growing populace in the world.
Combined with Facebook and Twitter, these sources supply 66% of young people their main news source, and all rely on algorithms. To increase views, clicks and advertising revenues, they show stories that viewers want to see – and slant viewpoints further. The result? Increasingly polarised and conflicting views in society, as people are exposed to a less diverse diet of actual current affairs.
As a geography teacher, I regularly ask students how they access news. Sadly, it is now rare that one hand will be raised when I ask about mainstream and unsponsored sources. We have accepted that reading newspapers comes with political and social angles, but social media exacerbates this further by denying broad coverage.
I am often asked about my greatest fear for the future. Rather than climate change, I reply “poor information”, as this increasingly undermines cooperation and good citizenship that we, as an ingenious species, can use to solve global problems. My message to them is: “Don’t get news from algorithms.”
Ollie Davies
Balcombe, West Sussex
