The hearings in America They prefer digital sources of information, including social media platforms, although they have low levels of trust in news and the majority are reluctant to pay for the information they consume online. This follows from the Digital News Report in 2024 of the Oxford University Reuters Institutewhich included six countries in the region: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru.
Ways to access information
On average, 77% of users get information online, six out of ten do so through social networks, 49% watch news on television and a sixth read printed newspapers, according to surveys conducted with 12,139 people in the region in January and February of this year. These proportions indicate that consumption decreased in almost all media: in 2023, 79% were informed online, 63% on social networks, 51% did so on television, and 18% did so through paper newspapers. The main device for accessing news is the cell phone, used by three quarters of those surveyed, followed by the computer (55%) and the tablet (28%).
Trust in the news
The drop in access to news information may be related to low levels of trust, which have remained stable since 2023. Only 35% of respondents in Latin America They trust the news most of the time. These values are the lowest globally: they compare with 53% in Africa40% in Europeand 41% in Asia and Oceania. The country with the highest levels of trust in news is Brazil (43%) and the lowest is Argentina (30%).
The low levels of trust could also explain the low proportion of people who pay for the news they access online: on average, only 16% in the region pay for information on the Internet, with a range that goes from 12% in Chili to 19% in Brazil. The tendency to pay for online journalistic content is higher in Northern Europewhere 27% of users have a subscription, or in USAwhere 22% pay by digital means.
News on platforms
Although the platforms remain the main access to digital information, none concentrates more than half of the users. Facebook It is used to access news by 43% of respondents, a drop of 9 percentage points from 2023. WhatsApp and Youtube are consulted by a third of those surveyed, while instagram is a source of information for 28% of users, compared to 32% in 2023. Almost one in five users uses TikTok to access information. Instead x (ex Twitter) is increasingly less relevant: only 11% use it as a news source, four percentage points less than in 2023, despite the fact that it is the preferred platform for journalists and political figures.
These data indicate that audiences in Latin America They configure different information regimes, mainly digital and free. Trust in news and the willingness to pay for it remains at low levels at the regional level and access to information through platforms is increasingly fragmented.
