The Digital News Report notes that social media, and Facebook in particular, has seen a sharp drop in news consumption globally, as well as in the US. “News consumption via Facebook is down 9 percentage points in the United States and 20 points with younger groups,” Nic Newman, a research associate with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, wrote in the report’s overview.
Newman continued: “In our urban Brazilian sample the use of Facebook for news has fallen to 52 percent — a 17 point change from 2016.”
According to The NYPost, the report was quick to add that the decline is not universal, with Facebook news usage rising in countries like Malaysia and the Czech Republic, “but in most countries the picture is one of decline.”
Facebook recently announced it was funding news shows on its Facebook Watch platform, including one from Fox News, known as “Fox News Update.”
Part of the decline is due to concerns about privacy and the often contentious nature of debate on the platform, but also a change to Facebook’s algorithms, which have de-prioritized news in users’ News Feeds.
Following the company’s fourth-quarter earnings, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the changes, which included showing fewer viral videos, resulted in “reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours every day.”
The research was done by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, at the University of Oxford, and was based on a YouGov survey of “over 74,000 online news consumers in 37 countries including the US and UK.”
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