A massive cross-cultural study reported a 12% decline in overall news participation—including liking, sharing, and commenting on social media, and discussing news offline—a trend spanning 46 countries between 2015 to 2022. This research was published in New Media & Society.
“I was interested in news participation because in recent years many have expressed concerns about dark forms of participation, such as the sharing of ‘fake news’. Yet, what we see on social media isn’t a representative sample of reality,” said Sacha Altay (@Sacha_Altay), a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zürich in the department of political science. “For instance, we know that a small group of very active and vocal internet users drive most forms of dark participation online. I wanted to understand general trends in participation beyond these potentially unusual and unrepresentative cases.”
The research team used data from the Digital News Report surveys conducted by YouGov and its partners, which encompassed responses from 577,859 individuals across 46 countries over an eight-year period. These surveys were designed to be nationally representative, with quotas for age, gender, region, and, in some cases, education and political orientation.
Participants were asked about their engagement in various forms of news participation, such as talking about news face-to-face, sharing news on social media, commenting on news articles, sharing news via email, and so on. The researchers computed a participation score based on the sum of these activities. The study also gauged trust in news on a 5-point scale. At the country level, it included variables from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, including political polarization and freedom of discussion.
“The main takeaway is that in many countries, news participation is declining,” explained Altay. “For example, people report sharing, commenting, or liking news on social media less. This decline is not only confined to online spaces: people also report talking less about the news in face-to-face interactions with their friends or colleagues. The only form of participation that has increased is news sharing via private messaging applications such as WhatsApp.”
Specifically, sharing news on social media dropped by 29%, commenting decreased by 26%, and offline discussions fell by 24%. Conversely, sharing news through private messaging apps increased by 20%, suggesting a preference for private communication channels.
Participants with higher education levels, younger individuals, women, and those with a keen interest in news were more likely to participate in news activities. However, over time, the decline in participation was more pronounced among women, those without a bachelor’s degree, and individuals with low trust in news. This shift resulted in men eventually participating more than women, a reversal of the trend observed in 2015. Further, political polarization within countries was linked to lower levels of news participation, suggesting that increasing societal divides may discourage news engagement.
What questions still need to be answered? Altay said, “First, our findings suggest that we should pay more attention to the role that private messaging applications play in news participation. Second, we should try to understand why people seem to be moving away from public online spaces, and whether new forms of (online or offline) participation are emerging.”
The researcher noted a potential limitation. “We rely on self-reported measures of news participation, which is not ideal, but at the same time it’s the only way to conduct a longitudinal analysis of news participation in 46 countries. Moreover, rich countries of the Global North are over-represented in the data, so despite the cross-cultural scope of the dataset we cannot make claims about the whole world.”
“The decline in news participation that we document is likely a symptom of growing negative perceptions of the news: in the last seven years, trust in news has slowly but steadily declined, news avoidance has grown, and interest in news has fallen sharply,” Altay told PsyPost. “I see these trends as worrying given the role that the news plays in informing people and, among other things, holding politicians accountable.”
The paper, “News participation is declining: Evidence from 46 countries between 2015 and 2022”, was authored by Sacha Altay, Richard Fletcher, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen.