LONDON (AFP) – News consumption is increasingly shifting from social media like Facebook to messaging applications like WhatsApp, according to a study published yesterday which also found high levels of international public concern about fake news online.
The Reuters Institute report, which covers 37 countries in five continents, found that the use of social media for news fell by six percentage points in the United States compared to last year.
“Almost all the decline is due to a decrease in the discovery, posting and sharing of news in Facebook,” said lead author Nic Newman, a founding member of the BBC News website.
Facebook suffered its worst public relations disaster in its history when a huge data privacy breach was revealed earlier this year.
The scandal saw many users around the world opt to move away from Facebook, and to spend more time on other apps like WhatsApp and Instagram – which are also owned by Facebook.
The 2018 Digital News Report found that WhatsApp is now used for news by around half of the sample in Malaysia (54 percent) and Brazil (48 percent) and by around a third in Spain (36 percent) and Turkey (30 percent).
