Chris Roper: African audiences lead the global shift to social news
The 2025 Reuters Digital News Report reveals that news media in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa are among the world's most trusted, even as social media and video platforms overtake traditional outlets, writes Chris Roper.
Revelations of the 2025 The Reuters Digital News Report (DNR), now in its 14th iteration, include how audiences are moving towards social media and video platforms as a source of news, and the way this is contributing to the already eroding influence of traditional news organisations and 'supercharging a fragmented alternative media environment containing an array of podcasters, YouTubers, and TikTokkers.
At the same time, chatbots powered by generative AI are emerging as a new way to access information, especially with people under 35, raising concerns about a potential loss of search referral traffic to publisher websites and apps.'
There are still opportunities for news organisations to build different relationships with their readers, though, and arguably, this is especially so for African news publishers.
Reliable content
When describing how this applies to news globally, the authors write, 'Despite this, audiences remain mostly sceptical about news they find on both social and AI platforms, partly driven by concerns about access to reliable content. Online influencers and politicians are seen as the biggest threats in this regard, while the majority expect generative AI to make the news cheaper to make, but less accurate and less trustworthy. These concerns could offer opportunities for publishers, as audiences say they still look to news brands when checking for reliable information, ahead of sources such as politicians, influencers and trusted personal contacts.'
Brokering a relationship that rests on trust is, of course, not an easy thing. Potentially, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa are well placed to do this, given that there still exists a high level of trust in news in those countries.
The DNR includes a fourth African country, Morocco, but it is somewhat of an outlier in terms of the survey.
Data for Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa are based on surveys that are representative of younger, English-speaking online news users only, rather than their respective national populations, which makes it difficult to draw comparisons with Morocco, where the survey was targeted at a more heterogeneous group.
The report's authors advise caution when directly comparing data points between these African markets and countries with very high internet penetration where the online sample is more broadly representative of the national population. Bearing that caveat in mind, several instructive comparisons can still be made.
High levels of trust in Nigeria and Kenya
Nigeria and Kenya stand out with significantly high levels of overall trust in news.
Nigeria recorded the highest overall trust among all 48 markets surveyed at 68% (ranking 1st), and Kenya was close behind at 65% (ranking 3rd).
Trust in news in Nigeria has increased since 2021. South Africa also reported a relatively high trust level at 55% (ranking 5th overall), well above the global average of 40%.
There is something of a red flag for South Africa, which has experienced a six percentage-point drop in trust since 2022 (from 61%), with almost all news brands seeing a decline.
Morocco has one of the lowest levels of trust in news among the surveyed countries, at just 28% (ranking 42nd), significantly lower than its African counterparts.
The real opportunity for media in Africa, perhaps, comes from this category of trust in media, and anxiety about what is real and what is false online.
A significant majority of all four countries express high concern about distinguishing true from false news information online, with the African region showing the highest concern globally (73%).
Both Kenya and Nigeria report 73% concern, and South Africa has 'high concern about information integrity' at 67%. Morocco's concern is at 54%.
This contrasts with Western Europe, which has the lowest levels of concern (46%).
Online influencers and personalities are perceived as a major threat for false or misleading information across all markets (47% global average).
This concern is particularly high in Kenya (59%), Nigeria (58%), and South Africa (56%, and specifically for TikTok). Morocco also sees online influencers/personalities (52%) as the biggest threat, followed by national politicians (30%).
All four countries exhibit a strong reliance on digital platforms and social media for news, which the report reveals is a trend common in the Global South.
Social media is a primary source, and the report points out that this is the first year that social media has displaced television as the top way Americans get news, with the proportion of news consumers accessing news via social media and video networks in the United States (54%) overtaking both TV news (50%) and news websites/apps (48%) for the first time. This is going to be a significant strategic issue for traditional news publishers in Africa.
How to take advantage of move to social media
Instead of succumbing to the existential threat of the ever-accelerating move towards social media, how do they take advantage?
The social media landscape is a fragmented one, with the report revealing that six online networks now reach more than 10% weekly with news content, compared to just two a decade ago, but African countries frequently rank among the top global users of social media platforms for news consumption, placing them in what we could term a social-first category alongside countries in Latin America and parts of Asia. This is particularly the case for video-centric platforms like YouTube and TikTok.
African countries show some of the highest weekly usage of YouTube for news. More than half of the sampled populations in Kenya (54%, up five percentage points), Morocco (49%), and Nigeria (49%, up five percentage points) reported using YouTube for news, with South Africa also showing significant usage at 42%, although this is down five percentage points since the 2024 DNR. This positions them alongside top Asian countries, such as India (55%) and Thailand (55%), and significantly above the global average of 30%.
TikTok and Facebook still major players
TikTok is growing rapidly as a network for news consumption. Kenya is at 38%, South Africa at 33%, Nigeria at 28%, and Morocco at 24%, which is notably higher than the average use in the United States (12%) and Europe (11%), and the global average of 16%.
Facebook is still a major player when it comes to news consumption. Nigeria leads with 65% weekly news usage, followed by Kenya (52%), South Africa (50%), and Morocco (47%). The global average is 36%. WhatsApp is also widely used for news in Africa, contrasting with the global average of 19%. Nigeria shows 53% weekly news usage, Kenya 46%, South Africa 41%, and Morocco 30%.
Instagram's news usage is also considerable for Nigeria at 41%, Morocco at 32%, and Kenya at 26%. In South Africa, Instagram is the lowest of the six social media platforms covered by the report, with only 15% of those surveyed indicating they used it for news, a two percentage-point drop from 2024 and below the global average of 19%.
Usage of social media platform X for news in African countries is mixed, with Kenya at 42%, Nigeria at 49% (a nine percentage point increase), Morocco at 11%, and South Africa at 16%. Kenya and Nigeria are way above the global average of 12%.
READ | Online hate speech hits Africa, social media firms told to act
Amid the decline in consumption of traditional news media, there is some hope in terms of consumption of local news in South Africa.
The country stands out with the highest interest in local news (60%) among the surveyed countries, significantly higher than the average interest in local news across 45 markets (32%). This question was not asked for Kenya and Nigeria.
Interestingly, audiences in these African countries, as well as in Asia, show notably higher comfort levels with news content produced mostly by AI with some human oversight compared to Europe. South Africa's comfort level is 34%, higher than the USA (19%) and Europe (15%).
This might prove to be an opportunity for African news publishers to embark on a transparent implementation of AI into their news flow, one that includes audiences in the process.
Instead of a challenge to editorial integrity, this could be a mechanism to build trust with readers.
News avoidance
A major threat, though, is the high levels of news avoidance. Globally, the DNR authors tell us, 'trust and low engagement in the news are closely connected with 'avoidance', an increasing challenge in a high-choice news environment, where news is often upsetting in different ways. Across markets, four in 10 (40%) say they sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29% in 2017 and the joint highest figure we've ever recorded (along with 2024).'
News avoidance varies among the four African countries, with Kenya reporting a 50% news avoidance, South Africa 41%, Nigeria 35%, and Morocco 39%.
The DNR identifies some key threats to traditional media, such as the continued reliance on social media, video platforms, and online aggregators for news, the pressure on business models, attacks on press freedom, and the emergence of AI platforms and chatbots as new sources of news.
It's not all doom and gloom for African news publishers, though. In some cases, they can learn from the rest of the world, but in other cases, they have the opportunity to take advantage of the differences in their own local environments.
Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa have some of the highest levels of trust in news globally, which can potentially be leveraged to position themselves as reliable sources amid growing scepticism about information on social and AI platforms.
- Chris Roper is a deputy CEO at Code for Africa.
Note: The Africa launch of the Reuters DNR takes place on Monday, 23 June, (13:00 CAT), hosted by Reuters Institute of Journalism in partnership with Code for Africa. A presentation by lead author Nic Newman will be followed by a panel discussion featuring Ajibola Amzat from the Centre for Collaborative Investigative Journalism, Justine Wanda from Fake Woke and Jillian Green from Daily Maverick. Sign up now.
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