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Social Media Platforms Are Top News Sources for British Teens, Report Reveals

The Instagram app is seen on a smartphone in this illustration taken, July 13, 2021. (Reuters)
The Instagram app is seen on a smartphone in this illustration taken, July 13, 2021. (Reuters)
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Social Media Platforms Are Top News Sources for British Teens, Report Reveals

The Instagram app is seen on a smartphone in this illustration taken, July 13, 2021. (Reuters)
The Instagram app is seen on a smartphone in this illustration taken, July 13, 2021. (Reuters)

Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are the top three news sources for teenagers in the UK, according to a report on news consumption patterns.

The report by regulator Ofcom found that “British teens are increasingly ditching traditional news outlets, and resorting to Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter to keep up with the latest news.”

The regulator also found that Instagram is the most popular news source for teenagers, used by 29 percent, followed by TikTok and YouTube used by 28 percent of teens.

It noted that BBC One and BBC Two, which were historically the most popular news sources for teenagers, have moved from the first to fifth place. Only a quarter of teenagers – 24 percent – have used these channels for news in 2022, compared to 45 percent, five years ago. ITV ranked in fourth place with 25 percent of the teens using it.

The report revealed that “TikTok has seen the largest uptick as a news source among the other social media platforms. Two years ago, 0.8 million UK adults used the video platform as a news source, and 3.9 million adults - or 7 percent - in 2022.” The increase is mainly driven by younger age groups, with half its users aged 16 to 24.

Fadi Ramzi, expert in digital media affairs, believes that “these findings conform with the results of a report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism released earlier this year. Reuters’ report highlighted a decline in people’s interest in news because of the negative Covid-19 developments, the Russian-Ukrainian war, and many other issues.”

“This decline has been accompanied by a higher turnout for social media platforms, which according to Reuters, have been used as news sources, topped by YouTube at the time,” he told Asharq Al-Awsat.

Ramzi suggested that Instagram leads other platforms as a news source because “it’s used by many journalists and media figures.”

The Ofcom study showed that news organizations are having to compete with non-journalist TikTokers as a news source on the platform. For those who consume news on TikTok, their main source is other people they follow (44 percent), followed by friends and family (32 percent) and then news organizations (24 percent).

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Technology

Meta Abruptly Ends US Fact-checks Ahead of Trump Term

Attendees visit the Meta booth at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on March 22, 2023. (AP)
Attendees visit the Meta booth at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on March 22, 2023. (AP)
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Meta Abruptly Ends US Fact-checks Ahead of Trump Term

Attendees visit the Meta booth at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on March 22, 2023. (AP)
Attendees visit the Meta booth at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on March 22, 2023. (AP)

Social media giant Meta on Tuesday slashed its content moderation policies, including ending its US fact-checking program on Facebook and Instagram, in a major shift that conforms with the priorities of incoming president Donald Trump.

"We're going to get rid of fact-checkers (that) have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US," Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post.

Instead, Meta platforms including Facebook and Instagram, "would use community notes similar to X (formerly Twitter), starting in the US," he added.

Meta's surprise announcement echoed long-standing complaints made by Trump's Republican Party and X owner Elon Musk about fact-checking that many conservatives see as censorship.

They argue that fact-checking programs disproportionately target right-wing voices, which has led to proposed laws in states like Florida and Texas to limit content moderation.

"This is cool," Musk posted on his X platform after the announcement.

Zuckerberg, in a nod to Trump's victory, said that "recent elections feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech" over moderation.

The shift came as the 40-year-old tycoon has been making efforts to reconcile with Trump since his election in November, including donating one million dollars to his inauguration fund.

Trump has been a harsh critic of Meta and Zuckerberg for years, accusing the company of bias against him.

The Republican was kicked off Facebook following the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol by his supporters, though the company restored his account in early 2023.

Zuckerberg, like several other tech leaders, has met with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida ahead of his January 20 inauguration.

Meta in recent days has taken other gestures likely to please Trump's team, such as appointing former Republican official Joel Kaplan to head up public affairs at the company.

He takes over from Nick Clegg, a former British deputy prime minister.

Zuckerberg also named Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) head Dana White, a close ally of Trump, to the Meta board.

Kaplan, in a statement Tuesday, insisted the company's approach to content moderation had "gone too far."

"Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in 'Facebook jail,'" he said.

As part of the overhaul, Meta said it will relocate its trust and safety teams from liberal California to more conservative Texas.

"That will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams," Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg also took a shot at the European Union "that has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there."

The remark referred to new laws in Europe that require Meta and other major platforms to maintain content moderation standards or risk hefty fines.

Zuckerberg said that Meta would "work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more."

Additionally, Meta announced it would reverse its 2021 policy of reducing political content across its platforms.

Instead, the company will adopt a more personalized approach, allowing users greater control over the amount of political content they see on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

AFP currently works in 26 languages with Facebook's fact-checking program, in which Facebook pays to use fact-checks from around 80 organizations globally on its platform, WhatsApp and on Instagram.

In that program, content rated "false" is downgraded in news feeds so fewer people will see it and if someone tries to share that post, they are presented with an article explaining why it is misleading.

Community Notes on X (formerly Twitter) allows users to collaboratively add context to posts in a system that aims to distill reliable information through consensus rather than top-down moderation.

Meta's move into fact-checking came in the wake of Trump's shock election in 2016, which critics said was enabled by rampant disinformation on Facebook and interference by foreign actors like Russia on the platform.