Where do you get your news from?

Where do you get your news from? It’s a simple question with a pretty predictable answer. Unsurprisingly, the BBC is the UK public’s number one provider of news, with ITV in second place according to regulator Ofcom.

However, the third place is a little more surprising: Meta. The parent company of Instagram and Facebook, Meta is classed by Ofcom as an ‘online intermediary’ for news – meaning they operate sites which aggregate news or make it available to search for. In 2024, almost 6 in 10 adults (59%) in the UK were found by Ofcom to be regularly getting their news from these online intermediaries, which also include big hitters such as Google (including Google News and YouTube), and X (formerly Twitter). That number rises to 71% for 16-24 year olds.

Now, the purpose of this article isn’t to criticise those who are getting their news from social media or online sources. It’s good to see people – particularly young people – engaging with the world around them, and there is plenty of accurate, well-researched and brave journalism published online and through social media.

I do want to ask those using these sites to ask themselves a second question when they engage with the content though: Who put your news there, and why?

These intermediary sites are wide open to exploitation. Despite previously spending over $100m on third party fact-checking across Facebook and, later, Instagram since 2016, Meta’s boss Mark Zuckerberg has now bowed to pressure from President Trump and announced he was abandoning the idea entirely going forward. Who could possibly benefit from removing a service to ensure the news is factual?

Perhaps as a direct consequence, the long-standing issue of fake news online is getting worse. So-called ‘alternative facts’ – which Trump’s administration seemed so fond of the first-time round – are back with a bang; Health Secretary Robert Kennedy’s use of social media to spread vaccine conspiracies has made it harder to protect the world’s most vulnerable children from preventable illnesses, according to David Milliband of the International Rescue Committee charity.

But arguably even scarier than the open consideration of ‘alternative facts’ is the thousands of fake AI-generated articles, promoted and circulated by AI bots, and sometimes even accompanied by deepfake politician or celebrity endorsements or interviews. Charity Full Fact were exposed to over 1200 fake posts on Facebook, including fake reports of accidents in local areas and news of a serial killer being at large. Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting were both victims of fake audio being produced by AI during the last election, while a man reportedly lost £76k after falling victim to a deep-faked video of respected finance expert Martin Lewis promoting an investment scheme. These videos look real and sound real, but they are designed to mislead, confuse, and sow discord.

News doesn’t have to be outright fake in order to be misleading, either. People can frame facts and stats however they choose – and to fit whatever narrative suits them best.   If you haven’t already found your way to it, do check out this great series on BBC Sounds entitled More or Less: Behind the Stats which in my view does an excellent job of bringing to the fore the incessant spinning of statistics, headlines and untruths that have become so commonplace in our news feeds.

This is also a problem in traditional news – for example, the Reach PLC newspaper Birmingham Live was found by regulator IPSO to have published ‘actively misleading’ headlines when it presented speculation that the Government may scrap free bus passes for state pensioners as fact – and on social media. Unsurprisingly though, the lack of a regulator for much of the online content makes it far more prevalent there.

How many times have you seen a news article about your favourite sports team where ‘fans have been outraged’ and after six paragraphs of generic backstory, you find that this ‘outrage’ consisted of two people on the platform X? By the time you realise this is a non-story, you’ve clicked and you’ve lingered on the site, earning the owner advertising  revenue. It’s clickbait, it’s a complete waste of time and it's everywhere.

As well as being more widespread, fake news is becoming harder to spot due to oversaturation. The average person in the UK receives 146 notifications from their phone every single day. Of that, the average number of alerts from news outlets is 10 a day – but those who use their phones more often are sometimes getting more than 40.

It may sound counter-intuitive, but by limiting your news intake to a smaller number of trusted sources, and taking the time to process what you have read or heard, you will have a better chance of making your mind up about issues based on accuracies, not inaccuracies. This is crucial, because when the news makes the world feel like a scary place and you find yourself lacking the time or information to make up your mind, you can tend towards relying on a ‘heuristic response’: finding shortcuts based on ingrained societal biases and instinctive fear of the unknown – essentially, the art of jumping to conclusions. This is the reason much of this content is pushed out: to sew division and encourage us to blame the ‘other’ when times get tough.

Ask yourself who benefits from this abuse of the news? Who wants you to get angry? Which bad actor might be better off if you distrust the regulated news and instead embrace unregulated sources? And if your first thought there was ‘who regulates the regulator?’ are you critical of your own filters and heuristics?

History is peppered with instances where terrible things have happened because objective truth became questionable, controllable narrative. Great evils have been perpetrated by people accepting false narratives designed to make them feel comforted, seen, and justified in their fears – narratives created by people manipulating them for their own twisted benefit are becoming more and more common, and are even appearing in places and institutions that may previously have been considered guardians of truth and integrity.

Regretfully, we have to be alive to mis-information and critical of our news sources if we want to reverse what I see as an affront to our long held belief in the integrity of a free and impartial press.  It’s incumbent upon us to to consider multiple sources and take the time to think more deeply about the subject matter. We have to make decisions based not on fear, but on understanding and appreciation of the facts, cognisant of the event present threat that those who speak loudest may not always have right on their side.