The EconomistDecember 21st 2019 International 872 tell people about the political situation in
Kashmir. “Activism has become one of the
easiest ways to project yourself as cool,”
says Sadie, another Lexington teen. It is not
uncommon to scroll through Instagram
and find out about a high-profile divorce
and a roiling protest in some remote corner
of the world within the span of one second.
This weird mix of celebrities, politics
and activism is another feature of modern
news on social media: “news” now comes
not only from accounts and outlets dedi-
cated to the dissemination of journalism,
but could be anything from a meme to the
opinion of an online personality, such as
PewDiePie, the world’s most influential
YouTuber, who mostly makes silly videos
about video games and online culture. For
five years he had the largest number of fol-
lowers on the video-sharing platform, un-
til he was overtaken by t-Series, an Indian
record label, in April 2019. He is now sec-
ond, with 102m subscribers. The combined
print and digital circulation of every news-
paper in America is about 30m. Daksha, a
13-year-old in Kentucky, spends her spare
time making memes and posting them to a
PewDiePie-themed community on Reddit,
looking for the “satisfaction that Lord Pew-
DiePie reacted to my meme” on his chan-
nel, she says.
You love to see it
Sarah, 16, from Kentucky, says that “every
boy on the debate team is into Ben Sha-
piro,” a conservative controversialist with
876,000 subscribers on YouTube. In Ger-
many a YouTuber called Rezo (1.16m sub-
scribers) went viral with a rant against old
and rich people and particularly the Chris-
tian Democratic Union, the party of Angela
Merkel. Felipe Neto, a Brazilian YouTuber
(35m) earns 30m reais a year ($7.5m). He
started out telling jokes to adolescents but
has evolved into a fierce critic of Jair Bolso-
naro, the president. In September he made
headlines for distributing 14,000 gay-
friendly books at Rio de Janeiro’s book fair
after the city’s evangelical mayor censored
a graphic novel that featured a gay hero.
Teenagers are, in short, getting their news
from other young people who largely ex-
press their personal opinions and are bare-
ly any better informed than themselves.
As Mr Mittman puts it, teen news con-
sumers are looking for “a level of authen-
ticity that allows you to know that they’re
speaking to you”. Other teenagers say they
get their news from clips of late-night tv
hosts, such as Trevor Noah or Stephen Col-
bert, or from stand-up comedians like Ha-
san Minhaj, who has a popular show on
Netflix. Personalities are replacing news
organisations. “I feel like it’s boring if it’s
an article. But if it’s a video it’s super engag-
ing,” says Dioneilys, 16, in Boston.
That opens the door to partisanship and
misinformation. The Amazon-fire postsfrom the summer were riddled with errors.
Personalities like PewDiePie and other
YouTubers are routinely accused of making
inflammatory comments or pulling taste-
less stunts. Memes often bear little relation
to fact. Many teens say they know all this
but are sanguine about the dubious origins
of their news. Sheer repetition is enough to
convince some. “I don’t believe anything I
read on social media,” says Jaliyah in Bos-
ton. “Unless it keeps coming, then maybe.”
Others believe information if it comes
from verified accounts. But many trust it as
long as it comes from their friends.
Many Brazilians “immediately believe
in the authenticity of audio sent via Whats-
App by someone they know”, while furrow-
ing their brows at a tape leaked to Folha de
S. Paulo, a major newspaper, says Joel Pin-
heiro da Fonseca, a 34-year-old columnist
for Folha. Realising that few young people
were reading his column (or indeed any
other section of his newspaper), Mr Pin-
heiro started a YouTube channel, where
fans comment on his shaggy hair or home
furnishings as often as on his political
analysis. “To them, the rudimentary quali-
ty makes it more authentic,” he says.
“Young people want to establish a relation-
ship with their sources of information.”
One consequence of a reliance on per-
sonalities is that the platforms on which
they appear rather than publications be-
come the sources of news. “When your
starting position is social—WhatsApp, In-
stagram, whatever—your loyalty to any
given publisher is much lower,” says Sa-
tyan Gajwani, who runs the digital arm of
the Times Group, India’s biggest media
conglomerate. More than half a billion peo-
ple visit its digital properties every month;
more than 100m do so every day. “How do
we build enough confidence and trust in
them that they become brand-loyal?” he
asks. Manvi, a 15-year-old in Delhi, exem-
plifies his worry. Her family subscribes totwo Times Group newspapers but online
she reads whatever “pops up on the phone
when I open Chrome”. Asked where the
news comes from, she says, “I don’t know
anything about that.”
A report from Ofcom found that “when
people consume news in this way, their en-
gagement is typically fleeting.” Moreover,
“they are also less likely to be aware of the
source of news content. Some younger
people we spoke to didn’t have a close asso-
ciation with the bbc, regarding it as just
‘one of many’ online news providers.”*checks notes*
For businesses, this presents both oppor-
tunities and challenges. Upstarts such as
@houseofhighlights and @theshaderoom
will spawn imitators around the world, just
as BuzzFeed did for a previous generation.
Media organisations such as the bbc, In-
dia’s Times Group or America’s Turner,
which owns Bleacher Report, will be forced
to invest and acquire their way to rele-
vance. The big risk is that they could do that
and still fade as trust in big brands de-
clines. Either way, young people will con-
tinue to spend enormous amounts of time
online. “Social media basically controls ev-
ery aspect of our lives,” says Stacy, a 15-year-
old Bostonian.
For societies, that is more worrying.
YouTubers and Instagram personalities
sign no editors’ code of conduct, are unin-
terested in traditional practices of fairness
or objectivity, and their motives are un-
tainted by antiquated notions of public
benefit. That gives information insurgents
tremendous power. Governments and in-
stitutions cannot simply wish it away. In-
deed, some already seem to feel they have
little choice but to join the fray. In his
speech to the unMr Bukele said: “Although
we might not want to accept it and we
might kick against it, the internet is in-
creasingly becoming the real world.” 7