Social media leads as news source while trust in news slides

KUALA LUMPUR: Nearly seven in 10 Malaysian respondents turn to social media for news even as overall trust in news has slipped to 30 per cent, according to the Digital News Report 2026 published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

The two findings trace a gap between where people go for information and how much faith they place in what they find there. The numbers do not, however, establish that social media use is what has driven trust down.

Use of news websites among Malaysian respondents stood at 42 per cent, while television recorded 36 per cent, Malay Mail reported on Sept 12 in an account of the study's findings.

WhatsApp recorded 50 per cent use for news, followed by Facebook at 49 per cent. TikTok recorded 45 per cent and YouTube 41 per cent. The narrow distance between WhatsApp and Facebook should not be read as a wide split in habits.

In its Malaysia profile published on June 16, the Reuters Institute reported that overall trust in news fell seven percentage points from the previous year. The 30 per cent figure also sits below the global average of 37 per cent.

Trust, though, measures what respondents feel, not an objective verdict on whether a given report was accurate. Usage figures work the same way: they show which channels people open, not confirmation that what arrives there is true.

Nor does reading the news on Facebook or WhatsApp necessarily mean a reader has walked away from professional journalism. A shared link often carries that reader straight to a news organisation's own report. The platform that distributes a story and the newsroom that produced it are two different things.

The distinction matters to the question of who verifies the news. The name of an app says nothing about who made the content, what evidence stands behind it or whether any of it has been checked.

For any single post, the things worth establishing are the original source, the date of the event and the evidence supporting the claim. Even a genuine video can leave a false impression when it travels with the wrong date, the wrong location or the wrong caption.