domain:anarchonomicon.substack.com
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
4m ago
I can appreciate some ruthless will to power edgelord kino myself, but I know how badly translations from distant languages work, especially fan translations, especially of web novels that rarely have good prose to begin with, so I will probably pass.
In any event, I just hope that the author had the wisdom to finish his story and attach the file it to a dead man switch
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
17m ago
It turns out I’d already read Just An Assistant (which explicitly defends bondservanthood, not chattel slavery) and up-thumbed it a while back.
TheLoser
40m ago
This comment is gonna be an answer to all the comments you've posted, so apologies in advance if its a bit scattershot/accusatory.
I completely respect the desire to raise your kids in Toronto, while maintaining a quality of life approximately equal to your own. However, I'd urge you to reconsider how you view the challenges facing you. I've personally seen the apartment that my grandparents raised their kids in, and they raised 3 children in a small 2 bedroom apartment. Space challenges are almost always actually about the challenge of giving up space, and not about the physical impossibility of fitting in a child.
I'd also like to point out that your career trajectory lines up with your family planning; your (hypothetical) child won't need to have their own room until they're a couple of years old. That matches up with when you expect your salary increases enough to be able to comfortably sustain a 2-bedroom apartment - the best time to have a kid is now, because you'll be able to afford a bedroom for them, when they need it.
If born right now, my kid wouldn't have a backyard to play in. We live across the street from a park, but it's downtown so it sometimes has homeless tents in it.
.. I fucking loved growing up in Toronto. I want my kid to experience that. And Toronto is so much better now than when I was a kid.
These two statements are contradictory with respect to your desire to provide a better life for your children. If Toronto is so much better now than when you were a kid, how could it possibly be a downgrade in quality of life if you raise them up in Toronto now?
As for education, look into IB. Cheaper than Private school, more rigorous than Ontario High Schools.
The Toronto escape plan is probably Hamilton, which I actually think is super under-rated.
I agree, Hamilton is underrated, but have you considered the towns in the Greater Toronto Area, such as Burlington, or Oakville? Boring yes, but damn good places to raise a kid.
The main strategic value of taking Taiwan is removing the threat to China. Taiwan is in a position where they can easily bottle up Chinese naval traffic from getting into the South China Sea, and yeet missiles into strategic military and economic targets in the Chinese mainland. The chip fabs and any other economic value are a distant second. Ideally China would like to get those, which is probably why they haven’t invaded yet in the first place. China has its own chip fabs, so everyone else would be in a much worse position than China if they got destroyed.
Regarding your second point, for the US to blockade China, the United States would need to:
- Decide it’s actually going to fight China.
- Decide it’s an acceptable loss that the entire US economy falls apart in a matter of hours.
- Decide it’s ok incurring tens of thousands of military casualties in a matter of days.
- Decide it’s fine with the risk of nuclear conflict.
- Actually get it’s ships somewhere near the vicinity of Taiwan without getting them all sunk.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
44m ago
I just don’t understand why the journalist community is just incapable of self-correction here.
The incentives don't line up the right way. Both the external incentives (eyeballs, ad clicks, etc) and the internal ones (what bosses, themselves, and co-workers want)
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
50m ago
I just don’t understand why the journalist community is just incapable of self-correction here. The reason right-leaning news is growing is that it at least tries to get the facts right, and is open and honest about what it believes in. People like FOX and Joe Rogan because they’re trying to get things right and when they don’t get it exactly right, you at least know where they’re coming from. CNN pretends to be neutral but skews left and everyone is fairly aware of that.
I mostly go with AP and BBC when I’m trying to assess whether or not something is factual. Rogan is at least trying and has the virtue (increasingly rare in traditional news media) of letting the guests actually speak without interruption even when he clearly disagrees with them. And because of that, listeners at least get a full understanding of what that guest is trying to say. I find the practice of constantly interrupting the guests on a show to be annoying. If a conservative goes on CNN, he rarely gets to speak a complete sentence before getting cut off to make the counterpoint.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
54m ago
OK, so China flattens the island (incidentally destroying any facilities of value they might want, or they're destroyed deliberately to deny them to the invaders), but hasn't at all harmed the ability of the US to deny landings or blockade China.
charlesf
56m ago
Try Yandex, I use it more and more lately. It has a different set of problems than Google et al, Russian language results and worse at removing scam/fraud links, but it great at image/video search. Their political censors are entirely uninterested in the sorts of US culture war and IP issues that Google heavily restricts, and they don't have the main focus of the results on selling things.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1hr ago
Spitballing on the lower reach of influencers in Western Europe, but one thing I've noted about local political YouTubers etc. is that they often just seem to be doing a "Finnish version" of something (Finnish Rogan, Finnish BreadTube etc.), and they can't quite seem to get it right, being left in an uncanny valley zone where it's not properly like the original version but not properly something culturally Finnish either. Ironically one of the rare organic forms of video creation we've managed to get going is the "rappiotube" ("decadencetube"), where alcoholics (occasionally mixing alcohol with drugs) just get completely wasted and go out of control on live shows, though of course it would be hard to create a political/news project based on that concept.
dr_analog
razorboy
1hr ago
Homies: Ride or Die
Last week I got wheels rotating. Since then I've also added steering.
In the meantime I learned it doesn't work on my laptop at all since my GPU on that is much weaker. I traced it down to the skydome rendering and added a flag so I could disable it while away from my desktop. Not sure why it pwns the GPU so much. The skydome isn't particularly high res but perhaps I tesselated it into way way too many triangles. Time to dust off the Blender workflow again.
Separately I noticed there's a problem with how the wheels spin and play with the ambient sunlight. The light appears to get painted onto one section of the wheel and it spins around the wheel with it, which is obviously wrong.
I spent a few days on this and haven't made much progress. I'm kind of pulling my hair out.
There's clearly something wrong with matrix math but not entirely sure what. I first SRT (scale rotate translate) the car from world space into view space. Before I submit that rendering, I detect if a given submesh involves a wheel and do a further R to the matrix. This makes the wheels rotate perfectly with velocity, but I guess screws the lighting calculations up. Maybe the matrix math accidentally works for vertex shading but not normals calculation, though I think I'm doing the right things to isolate them.
I would add debug printfs but half of this shit is happening in the bgfx shader language so my debugging visibility is limited. Maybe there are tools for this...
TRON bike lighting
Slow progress. Forgot that I needed more JST-SM 4 pin connectors, so placed an order. Then I remembered that soldering even a few spots gives me a scratchy throat and maybe a headache and it could be because I'm breathing in the soldering smoke from having my face so close to it. So, I need an extractor fan.
Of course I couldn't just buy an extractor fan like a normal person, because I stumbled across a DIY one in this Great Scott video right when I realized this.
Dean Highlights The Reuters' 2025 Digital News Report So You Don't Have To
Consider this your invitation to get a drink, pop your feet up, and think about how the state of the world is conveyed to you rather than what the bad news of the week actually is.
(Is this escapism? Unrepentantly so. Also, a nerd out on the evolution of the media industry over the last few years. What else are you on the Motte for?)
This Monday the 2025 Digital News Report was published. This is a review of global media trends, such as how media consumption, habits, preferences, and audience composition have changed over the last years. It reflects on how various audiences consume and have been shaped by elements of the culture war, such as Musk's management of X, the rise of Tiktok, AI, and so on.
Given how much of the discourse here covers the coverage of these topics, this study seems salient. Especially since it is billed as the most comprehensive study of news consumption worldwide.
This is not an empty media boast. This probably is the most comprehensive, and global-spanning, media industry analysis I've read in some time, and while it's not without its blemishes. It's not without blemishes, but when the executive summary is 25 pages long (admittedly with many graphics), there's a lot to unpack. But since expecting anyone to read a 171 page report is a bit much, why not break it down a bit lot?
This post is going to be taking highlights, key points, and so on from the study executive summary. Much, but not all, will be quoted. I will make comments of my own where I feel most interested, but will try to keep my thoughts distinct from the article. Due to how it's formatted, it does not copy-paste neatly. Forgive the jank that slips through.
///
Who is this by for whom and why should you believe a word of it?
This is Ivy League level academic research made with significant assistance by corporate media clearly hoping for actionable insights at a global level. Given the monetary incentives at stake, this is a case where commercial interests, including those well outside western progressive circles, are a mitigating influence to personal preferences.
The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism is a part of Oxford University in England. This is an academic-journalism nexus by, of, and for industry professionals. This level of academia has a lot of cross-pollination with the US, but this isn't 'merely' an advocacy section, but a professional interest institution.
The key sponsors and supporters of this report are identified on page 3 of the PDF. The 'main sponsor' is Google News Initiative, but the 'supported by' includes a whose-who of major western media companies. Not just newspaper companies like Reuters either, but groups like Youtube, BBC, Korea Press Foundation, Ofcom, CodeAfrica, and other media actors. This is Media as a Business, not media as a political faction, and the target audiences are global, not American-European specifically.
This sponsorship is key for understanding the article's focus on consumer demographics, preference changes, and so on. This is a report on 'how people consume digital news' paid by the types of groups that provide digital media. When it addresses topics of 'people are tuning out,' this is not (primarily) in the sense of an ideological 'people are ignoring us,' but in the context of 'consumers are not consuming your product for these reasons.'
This corporate motive is a basis to give credence to the data-driven observations here. This is a product paid for with money to generate more money, and so accuracy is an interest more than ideological performance. When the study talks about media market trends, it's for the sake of people who want a more accurate understanding of the media market.
That said... (Bias Warning)
Yes, there is bias, of a predictable pro-media-establishment sort. Oxford is still a prestige university, and the Reuters Institute being a professional interest institution is still both for, by, and once again for journalists. Unsurprisingly, they have a good impression of themselves, and bad impression of others who doubt their conduct or character. The dislike of Trump is palpable in the way that only 'we will use studiously neutral language except for our word choice framing unfavored actors' can be, and gets a bit more blatant in country-by-country breakdowns deep in.
That said- it's still worth reading. This is what it looks like when people try to mitigate their biases and take an objective look at the situation. Whatever the authors of a specific section may feel people should feel about themselves, they are not adverse to directly recognizing things like low reputational trust.
///
The Methodology
This is a 'good enough to be useful' YouGov online questionnaire between January and February 2025, not a 'gold standard' method. Page 6 has the disclaimers and caveats for how strongly, or not strongly, to take certain elements. Statistics given should be understood to be ballpark estimates.
• Samples were assembled using nationally representative quotas for age, gender and region in every market. Education quotas were also applied in all markets except Kenya, Nigeria, Morocco, Peru, and Thailand. We also applied political quotas based on vote choice in the most recent national election in around a third of our markets including the United States, Australia, and much of Western Europe. The data in all markets were weighted to targets based on census/industry accepted data.
Note that 2024 was a year of many major elections in the US and Europe. As a result, this (should) reflect a fair deal of European political distribution.
• Data from India, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa are representative of younger English-speakers and not the national population, because it is not possible to reach other groups in a representative way using an online survey. The survey was fielded mostly in English in these markets,1 and restricted to ages 18 to 50 in Kenya and Nigeria. Findings should not be taken to be nationally representative in these countries.
The survey was not done in English in most markets, however, giving substantial insight potential.
• More generally, online samples will tend to under-represent the news consumption habits of people who are older and less affluent, meaning online use is typically over-represented and traditional offline use under-represented. In this sense, it is better to think of results as representative of the online population.
This is the key caveat. This is not a full study of all media consumers, but specifically online media consumers, i.e. the generation of today and the trends to expect to grow tomorrow as old people die and younger people replace them.
• The use of a non-probability sampling approach means that it is not possible to compute a conventional ‘margin of error’ for individual data points. However, differences of +/- 2 percentage points (pp) or less are very unlikely to be statistically significant and should be interpreted with a very high degree of caution. We typically do not regard differences of +/- 2pp as meaningful, and as a general rule we do not refer to them in the text. The same applies to small changes over time.
Don't put too much faith on the exact numbers, but do value the magnitude and general direction.
///
Opening Narrative
This executive summary opens with this narrative, before many sub-sections. This section is quoted in full.
This year’s report comes at a time of deep political and economic uncertainty, changing geo-political alliances, not to mention climate breakdown and continuing destructive conflicts around the world. Against that background, evidence-based and analytical journalism should be thriving, with newspapers flying off shelves, broadcast media and web traffic booming. But as our report shows, the reality is very different. In most countries we find traditional news media struggling to connect with much of the public, with declining engagement, low trust, and stagnating digital subscriptions.
An accelerating shift towards consumption via social media and video platforms is further diminishing the influence of ‘institutional journalism’ and supercharging a fragmented alternative media environment containing an array of podcasters, YouTubers, and TikTokers. Populist politicians around the world are increasingly able to bypass traditional journalism in favour of friendly partisan media, ‘personalities’, and ‘influencers’ who often get special access but rarely ask difficult questions, with many implicated in spreading false narratives or worse.
These trends are increasingly pronounced in the United States under Donald Trump, as well as parts of Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, but are moving more slowly elsewhere, especially where news brands maintain a strong connection with audiences. In countries where press freedom is under threat, alternative ecosystems also offer opportunities, at their best, to bring fresh perspectives and challenge repressive governments. But at the same time these changes may be contributing to rising political polarisation and a coarsening debate online. In this context, our report uncovers a deep divide between the US and Europe, as well as between conservatives and progressives everywhere, over where the limits of free speech should lie – with battle lines drawn over the role of content moderation and fact-checking in social media spaces.
This year’s survey also highlights emerging challenges in the form of AI platforms and chatbots, which we have asked about for the first time. As the largest tech platforms integrate AI summaries and other news-related features, publishers worry that these could further reduce traffic flows to websites and apps. But we also show that in a world increasingly populated by synthetic content and misinformation, all generations still prize trusted brands with a track record for accuracy, even if they don’t use them as often as they once did.
With growing numbers of people selectively (and in some cases consistently) avoiding the news, we look into the potential benefits of using new generative AI technologies to personalise content and make it feel more engaging for younger people. Our report, which is supported by qualitative research in three markets (the UK, US, and Norway), also includes a chapter on the changing state of podcasting as the lines blur with video talk shows and explores the prospects for charging for audio content. We also investigate where the value lies in local news and what appetite there might be towards more flexible ways of paying for online content, including ‘news bundles’.
This fourteenth edition of our Digital News Report, which is based on data from six continents and 48 markets, including Serbia for the first time, reminds us that these changes are not always evenly distributed. While there are common challenges around the pace of change and the disruptive role of platforms, other details are playing out differently depending on the size of the market, long-standing habits and culture, and the relationship between media and politics. The overall story is captured in this Executive Summary, followed by Section 2 with chapters containing additional analysis, and then individual country and market pages in Section 3.
///
Key Findings
This section is provided in full. Following sections will be selective extracts.
• Engagement with traditional media sources such as TV, print, and news websites continues to fall, while dependence on social media, video platforms, and online aggregators grows. This is particularly the case in the United States where polling overlapped with the first few weeks of the new Trump administration. Social media news use was sharply up (+6pp) but there was no ‘Trump bump’ for traditional sources.
One of the (not explicit) trends in the survey is that alternative-media news consumption increases as the engagement, and trust, in traditional media falls. There is more explicit recognitition of alternative media environments later.
• Personalities and influencers are, in some countries, playing a significant role in shaping public debates. One-fifth (22%) of our United States sample says they came across news or commentary from popular podcaster Joe Rogan in the week after the inauguration, including a disproportionate number of young men. In France, young news creator Hugo Travers (HugoDécrypte) reaches 22% of under-35s with content distributed mainly via YouTube and TikTok. **Young influencers also play a significant role in many Asian countries, including Thailand. **
One of the (non-explicit) parallels/trends in this study is that the US media market is diverging in style from Europe, and more towards Asia. This correlates with relative trust in establishment media and political polarization, which is characterized here as having been higher in Asia than in Europe for some time.
• News use across online platforms continues to fragment, with six online networks now reaching more than 10% weekly with news content, compared with just two a decade ago. Around a third of our global sample use Facebook (36%) and YouTube (30%) for news each week. Instagram (19%) and WhatsApp (19%) are used by around a fifth, while TikTok (16%) remains ahead of X at 12%.
Remember the selection bias for the yougov poll, but later points indicate that the increase in social media news-sourcing being done by younger demographics, i.e. the long-term future.
• Data show that usage of X for news is stable or increasing across many markets, with the biggest uplift in the United States (+8pp), Australia (+6pp), and Poland (+6pp). Since Elon Musk took over the network in 2023 many more right-leaning people, notably young men, have flocked to the network, while some progressive audiences have left or are using it less frequently. Rival networks like Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon are making little impact globally, with reach of 2% or less for news.
This surprised me a bit since there was a dedicated effort to undercut / subvert X due to Musk. Later data indicates this is more because more right-leaning people joined than left-leaning people left, which isn't surprising, but the failure of the rivals to scale upwards is notable as a long-term influence vector.
• Changing platform strategies mean that video continues to grow in importance as a source of news. Across all markets the proportion consuming social video has grown from 52% in 2020 to 65% in 2025 and any video from 67% to 75%. In the Philippines, Thailand, Kenya, and India more people now say they prefer to watch the news rather than read it, further encouraging the shift to personality-led news creators.
This is an interesting trend / potential causal loop where low trust in establishment media feeds social media sources, social media sources leading to more trusted personalities, and those personality-led creators being more successful with video, not just audio or text, as the way to establish their personality for the personal relationship trust.
• Our survey also shows the importance of news podcasting in reaching younger, better-educated audiences. The United States has among the highest proportion (15%) accessing one or more podcasts in the last week, with many of these now filmed and distributed via video platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. By contrast, many northern European podcast markets remain dominated by public broadcasters or big legacy media companies and have been slower to adopt video versions.
Video-podcasts are rising / eclipsing purely audio-podcasting, which may factor in the personal-relationship-trust alternative model raised above.
• TikTok is the fastest growing social and video network, adding a further 4pp across markets for news and reaching 49% of our online sample in Thailand (+10pp) and 40% in Malaysia (+9pp). But at the same time people in those markets see the network as one of the biggest threats when it comes to false or misleading information, along with Facebook.
Growth of tiktok is not surprising. Credibility might be noteworthy later. One of the information-conflict concerns over Tiktok is that Chinese control over the alorithm shapes what people will see, and thus believe. I've my doubts on the efficacy of that level of influence, and this point on platform-prevalence also corresponding with platform-skepticism suggest that the personality-led model will matter more, which mitigates/reduces the impact of algorithmic bias efforts.
• Overall, over half our sample (58%) say they remain concerned about their ability to tell what is true from what is false when it comes to news online, a similar proportion to last year. Concern is highest in Africa (73%) and the United States (73%), with lowest levels in Western Europe (46%).
Note that Western Europe is a major outlier in the media-skeptic trends, but even here it is a nearly 50-50 concern split. This will be relevant two items down.
• When it comes to underlying sources of false or misleading information, online influencers and personalities are seen as the biggest threat worldwide (47%), along with national politicians (47%). Concern about influencers is highest in African countries such as Nigeria (58%) and Kenya (59%), while politicians are considered the biggest threat in the United States (57%), Spain (57%), and much of Eastern Europe.
I'll just note with some humor that the 'influencers' are raised as the biggest threat, despite the same % as 'national politicians.' This is what I meant earlier about elements of bias seeping in.
• Despite this, the public is divided over whether social media companies should be removing more or less content that may be false or harmful, but not illegal. Respondents in the UK and Germany are most likely to say too little is being removed, while those in the United States are split, with those on the right believing far too much is already taken down and those on the left saying the opposite.
When combined with the online truthiness statistic above, this may suggest that efforts on the European level for media fact checking are hinged on (decreasing) higher-trust / older demographic of the political-establishment-center who feels things might yet still be saved.
If those European efforts don't become policy sooner than later, then as political polarization / political-right normalization continues, European markets may hit the same sort of political tipping point where political pluralities view 'confidence-boosting fact checking' as 'politically motivated censorship against them,' facilitating the trust spiral. Thus, a limited political window of opportunity before establishment fatigue leads to the current establishments being able to implement these policies to (hopeful) success.
• We find AI chatbots and interfaces emerging as a source of news as search engines and other platforms integrate real-time news. The numbers are still relatively small overall (7% use for news each week) but much higher with under-25s (15%).
There's an unsurprising theme of the younger generation being both the most online, the most attuned to social media, and the most comfortable with AI products.
• With many publishers looking to use AI to better personalise news content, we find mixed views from audiences, some of whom worry about missing out on important stories. At the same time there is some enthusiasm for making the news more accessible or relevant, including summarisation (27%), translating stories into different languages (24%), better story recommendations (21%), and using chatbots to ask questions about news (18%).
• More generally, however, audiences in most countries remain sceptical about the use of AI in the news and are more comfortable with use cases where humans remain in the loop. Across countries they expect that AI will make the news cheaper to make (+29 net difference) and more-up-to-date (+16) but less transparent (-8), less accurate (-8), and less trustworthy (-18).
• These data may be of some comfort to news organisations hoping that AI might increase the value of human-generated news. To that end we find that trusted news brands, including public service news brands in many countries, are still the most frequently named place people say they go when they want to check whether something is true or false online, along with official (government) sources. This is true across age groups, though younger people are proportionately more likely than older groups to use social media to check information as well as AI chatbots.
Trusted News Brands is relevant in part because the personality-driven social media network is also a 'trust' relationship. The key point I'd take away / spread is that when people don't feel they can trust traditional media, they are increasingly comfortable / able to defect to the non-traditional media based on trust in a personality, since that's the next-best proximity.
This (loosely) aligns with a regular critique I've made regarding public legitimacy of officials during COVID, when institutional lying lost public trust. Trust / credibility is a resource that's not easily regained.
• One more relatively positive sign is that overall trust in the news (40%) has remained stable for the third year in a row, even if it is still four points lower overall than it was at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic.
Remember that this study is by journalist professionals, for journalist professionals. Also remember the warning of bias earlier. 'We should consider it a good sign only 60% do not overall trust in our profession, only one-in-twenty less than during Covid' is damning with faint praise.
• As publishers look to diversify revenue streams, they are continuing to struggle to grow their digital subscription businesses. The proportion paying for any online news remains stable at 18% across a basket of 20 richer countries – with the majority still happy with free offerings. Norway (42%) and Sweden (31%) have the highest proportion paying, while a fifth (20%) pay in the United States. By contrast, 7% pay for online news in Greece and Serbia and just 6% in Croatia
This is business-actionable advice. Don't be surprised if some media corporation takes this as evidence that people need to be less happy with free offerings.
///
The preceeding was just the first two pages of the Executive Summary, and this post is over 2/5ths of the word count. The rest of the EXSUM is section-by-section summaries, often elaborating on the key finding paragraphs posted above , so I will quote the major sections, and the most interesting bits by exception.
Please feel free to read the full thing. The executive summary is 25 pages, but it's one-paragraph bits like the above, and not terribly dense.
TRADITIONAL NEWS MEDIA LOSING INFLUENCE – UNITED STATES IN THE SPOTLIGHT
First, the proportion accessing news via social media and video networks in the United States (54%) is sharply up – overtaking both TV news (50%) and news websites/apps (48%) for the first time. Eight years ago, the so-called ‘Trump bump’ raised all boats (or temporarily stalled their sinking), including access to news websites, TV, and radio, but this time round only social and video networks (and most likely podcasts too) have grown, supporting a sense that traditional journalism media in the US are being eclipsed by a shift towards online personalities and creators.
These shifts are in large part driven by younger groups – so-called digital and social natives. Over half of under-35s in the United States – 54% of 18–24s and 50% of 25–34s – now say that social media/video networks are their main source (+13pp and +6pp respectively compared with last year). But all age groups are prioritising social media to a greater extent – at the expense of traditional channels such as websites and TV news
In culture-war terms, the red tribe seems to have succeeded in creating its alternative media ecosystem to survive (and thrive) in, and people are increasingly making the jump. X is not-quite-directly credited that elsewhere.
At the same time, we find a continued decline in audiences for traditional TV news, as audiences switch to online streaming for drama, sport, news, and more. TV news reach in France and Japan, for example, is down 4pp and 3pp to 59% and 50% respectively. Linear radio news, which had been relatively stable, is also on a downward trend, with younger audiences often preferring on-demand audio formats such as podcasting.
A non-culture-war explanation for part of the decline, however, is less about tribal politics, and more about technology and business models. As the internet streaming services have undercut cable TV, and internet aggregators undercut papers, traditional media consumption would be declining regardless of politics, just by medium-shift.
Taken together, these trends seem to be encouraging the growth of a personality-driven alternative media sector which often sets out its stall in opposition to traditional news organisations, even if, in practice, many of the leading figures are drawn from these. Prominent YouTubers outside the United States include Julian Reichelt, a former editor of Bild in Germany, and Piers Morgan, a former newspaper editor and TV presenter in the UK, but mostly name recognition in Europe for these news creators is much lower than the US.
Already hit the drum that, in the absence of trusted institutions, people will turn to trusted individuals.
A humorous culture swing at our (western) European members here is that the reason they have higher trust in their media institutions because they have more forgettable media influencers to steal them away.
PLATFORM RESETS AND THEIR IMPACT ON NEWS MEDIA
Last year we showed how changes to platform strategies for social media companies such as Meta – including a pulling back from news and investing in video and creator content – were making it even harder for publishers to reach specific audiences. Following Trump’s victory, Meta announced – in another sharp turn of direction – that they will show more political content, but the effects of this, and what it means for publishers in different countries, are yet to be seen.
This year’s data show continuing strengthening of video-based platforms and a further fragmentation of consumption. There are now six networks with weekly news reach of 10% or more compared with just two a decade ago, Facebook and YouTube. Although these networks remain the most important for news amongst the basket of 12 countries we have been tracking since 2014, they are increasingly challenged by Instagram and TikTok with younger demographics. But Messenger (5%), LinkedIn (4%), Telegram (4%,) Snapchat (3%), Reddit (3%), Threads (1%), and Bluesky (1%) are also an important part of the mix for specific audiences or for particular occasions
ELON MUSK’S X AUDIENCE SHIFTS RIGHTWARDS - NO LOSS OF OVERALL REACH
It is striking to see that X has not lost reach for news on aggregate across our 12 countries despite a widespread X-odus by liberals and journalists, including some prominent news organisations, some of whom have relocated to Threads or Bluesky. It may be that X’s reach is less affected than regular engagement, which industry research suggests had been declining before Trump’s return to the White House.
The italicized not was in the original, and is one of the very rare cases it was used. This is about as much of a professional shock as the authors can convey.
This may also shape media company / advertiser perceptions of dealing with X. Part of the X-odus was the (alleged) advertiser boycott. Industry data suggesting the X-audience has not dropped, but in some categories expanded to underserved markets, would support media-actor changes over time.
In the US, at least, the election and its aftermath seems to have re-energised the network. Our poll, which was conducted in the weeks after the inauguration, showed that the use of X for news was 8pp higher than the previous year, reaching almost a quarter (23%) of the adult population.
There is a good graphic in the document (pg 15) which shows X dropping about 5% from 20% to 15% by politically-left respondents after Musk's takeover and rebrand, before jumping to 24% after Trump's election. Over the same general time period, right-respondents when from 9% to 26% to using Twitter for news.
This- combined with the failure of the left-social-sphere like Bluesky- makes X an uncontested (but now bipartisan) public forum.
RISE OF VIDEO NETWORKS INCREASES PRESSURE ON NEWS MEDIA
For several years we have asked where people pay attention when using social networks and have found that mainstream media is at best challenged by – at worst losing out to – these online creators and personalities, even when it comes to news. This trend is evident again this time in data aggregated across all 48 markets. Creators now play a significant role in all the networks apart from Facebook, with traditional media gaining least attention on TikTok. This is not surprising as publishers have struggled to adapt journalistic content in a more informal space as well as worrying about cannibalising website traffic by posting in a network that is not set up for referral traffic.
The exception of TikTok is one of those actionable things for the corporate media funders/audience. This is an incentive to try and make deals with TikTok for greater access, and/or a basis to try and lawfare TikTok out of their domestic media markets.
UNDERLYING PREFERENCES ARE SHIFTING TOO
We’ve already explored the growing importance of online video news and news podcasts at a headline level but it is interesting to consider this in relation to text, which is still the dominant way in which most people access news. To what extent is this changing and with which demographics? Overall, we find that audiences on average across all markets still prefer text (55%), which provides both speed and control from a consumers’ perspective, but around a third (31%) say they prefer to watch the news online and more than one in ten (15%) say they prefer to listen. Country differences are particularly striking, with more people saying they prefer to watch rather than read or listen to the news in India, Mexico, and the Philippines. By contrast the vast majority still prefer to read online news in Norway, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
In the correlations with easier, the countries with higher establishment media trust, and the higher willingness to support media truth-corrections, are also the countries where most people still prefer to read rather than hear (or watch) their online news.
This very clear story about preferences is supported by data that show that consumption of online video has also jumped significantly in the last two years, after a period where it had remained relatively static. In the United States, for example, the proportion consuming any news video weekly has grown from just over half (55%) in 2021 to around three-quarters (72%) today. ***The majority of this consumption is accessed via third-party platforms (61%) such as Facebook, YouTube, X, Instagram, and TikTok rather than via news websites or apps (29%), adding further evidence to the narrative about the diminishing influence of legacy media. ***
Across all markets the proportion consuming social video news has grown from 52% in 2020 to 65% in 2025 and any video from 67% to 75%. A big part of the change has been the shift of platform strategies which has seen networks like Facebook, Instagram, and X prioritising video more in their algorithms, while Google has added a short video tab to its search results. At the same time, publishers have been producing more videos of various duration and showcasing them more prominently within their websites and apps. The Economist is amongst publishers to have added a vertical video carousel on its home page, while the New York Times has incorporated short social media-inspired videos as a way of bringing out the personality of its reporters.
The change of audience intake is liable to accelerate even in Europe, as media corporations (the study founders) are in a feedback loop of providing more video to meet demands for video, which are accelerating demands for video.
This suggests a... not imminently, but already changing media relationship that will- through the European sharing of US online service providers like Google- bring Europe towards the global norm of personality-media (the winners of video-format), and its associations with lower trust in traditional institutions. Which feeds into the 'window of opportunity' point for any establishment efforts at information-regulation.
THE CHANGING SHAPE AND GROWING INFLUENCE OF NEWS PODCASTING
Our previous research shows that around a third of our global audience accesses some type of podcast monthly, including specialist, sport, entertainment, and a range of lifestyle content, but this year we have changed our approach, focusing more closely just on the news and current affairs category. By adding podcasts to our news consumption question we are able to compare weekly usage for the first time with radio, television, and print news, as well other digital sources.
This new question still shows significant differences across countries, with higher weekly usage of news podcasts in the United States (15%), reflecting strong investment by publishers, independent producers, and advertisers over the last few years. Our data suggest that in the US a similar proportion now consume news podcasts each week as read a printed newspaper or magazine (14%) or listen to news and current affairs on the radio (13%). Nordic markets such as Denmark (12%), Sweden (11%), and Norway (11%) also have well-developed news podcast markets, but traditional radio remains much more important there (33% average weekly news reach across Northern Europe). In other parts of the world such as Italy (6%), Argentina (4%), and Japan (3%) the podcast market is more nascent.
I wonder how much of the US podcast culture is because of how it aligns with American driving culture, where a podcast is something you can do on the commute to work.
In the United States we find a clear split between analysis-led shows from legacy brands – such as the Daily (New York Times) and Up First (NPR) – and personality-led podcasts that mostly deal in commentary or point of view. Much of the latter overlaps with the growth of the (mostly right-leaning) alternative media ecosystem that we described earlier. In many cases their primary output is not audio but video, with YouTube now the main channel for podcast distribution in the United States. By contrast, Spotify is the most popular podcast platform in the UK and Germany, along with public service media apps such as BBC Sounds and ARD Audiothek.
ONLINE MISINFORMATION AND NEWS LITERACY
This is one of the sections where the professional/personal biases of the presenters can probably be most easily inferred.
In our survey, more than half of our respondents worldwide (58%) agree that they are worried about what is real and fake online when it comes to news – a similar number to last year, but 4pp higher than in 2022. Concern is highest in Africa (73%) where social media are widely used for news across all demographics, as well as the United States (73%), and lowest in Europe (54%). But it is important to put expressed concern in perspective, given that research shows that this is often driven by narratives they disagree with or perceptions of bias, rather than information that is objectively ‘made up’ or false (Nielsen and Graves 2017).
In many countries, leading national politicians are considered by respondents to pose the biggest threat, especially in the United States where Donald Trump’s second term has been marked by a strategy of ‘flooding the zone’, often with misleading information or false statements (e.g. that Ukraine started the war with Russia8). He has long used the term ‘fake news’ to vilify media critical of his policies.
Buried further down...
At the same time a significant group (32%) believes that journalists are a big part of the problem. This is especially the case in countries where mainstream media are seen to be unduly influenced by powerful agendas (e.g. Greece and Hungary). In polarised markets such as the United States, those that identify on the right are also much more inclined to see news media as a major threat, with many believing that they deliberately misinform the public and work to a liberal agenda.
I doubt the term 'liberal agenda' was chosen entirely by accident after 'powerful agenda.' (Particularly since 'progressive' barely shows in the study- primarily in the Twitter/X exodus after Musk, and then a few times in the later country studies.)
NEWS LITERACY MAKES LESS DIFFERENCE THAN YOU MIGHT THINK
This one is amusing.
We also asked in this year’s survey about whether people had received any education or training – formal or informal – on how to use news. **Across markets we find that only around a fifth (22%) of our global sample have done so but young people were roughly twice as likely to say they have had news literacy training compared with older groups (36% U35s compared with 17% 35+ globally). A number of Nordic markets, including Finland (34%), had the highest levels of news literacy training. France (11%), Japan (11%), and most of the countries in Eastern Europe and the Balkans had the least.
Remember- the age demographic most likely to eschew traditional media for personality-driven social media is also the demographic more likely too have received literacy training.
So- how do you define success?
We do find that those who have engaged in news literacy training are slightly more trusting of news than those that have not, but this may just be a function of higher levels of education overall. When checking information, these groups tend to use more different approaches on average than those that have had no training – including visiting trusted sources, fact-checking websites, official sources, and politicians, but this exposure to different perspectives may also be making them more sceptical. Those that have had literacy training are more concerned about misinformation – and are more likely to see social and video networks as a major threat (83% compared with 74%).
There is an interesting potential future implication this might have when it comes to corporate lobbying for media regulation / truthiness. Remember that this study was founded by, among others, Google and Youtube. They don't like necessarily that literacy trainign people are concerned a bit more about social and video networks... but young people are also predominantly on those networks, and more importantly, so are the trusted personality-centric mediators.
As a result, increasing concerns about misinformation- both of social media but also traditional media- is more likely to drive audiences to the personalities on the networks that certain corporate strategies can aim to own the profit-streams of.
HOW AUDIENCES VIEW THE ISSUE OF CONTENT MODERATION IN SOCIAL MEDIA
Across our entire sample, people were almost twice as likely to say that platforms were removing too little rather than too much (32%/18%). This view is particularly strong in the United Kingdom where new rules are starting to be enforced requiring platforms to do more to counter harmful content and make them safer by design, as well as in Germany. But it is a very different story in the United States and Greece where opinion is more split.
This is your reminder that Oxford University, the university overseeing this research, is based in the UK.
These differences around where the limits of free speech should lie are shaped in part by Europe’s history on one side and the US commitment to the First Amendment on the other. But even within the United States we find striking divisions too between those that identify on the left and the right. Almost half of those on the right (48%) think too much is already being removed, whereas a similar proportion of those on the left (44%) think exactly the opposite.
The study does not address why non-westerners stand where they do on censorship responsibilities for the public good.
Across all 48 markets, those on the left also want more content moderation, but those on the right are much more evenly split. Younger people are also in favour of more content moderation in general, but are less likely to say that than older groups, perhaps because they have grown up seeing and managing a wider set of perspectives in social media.
I've mentioned before the prospect of a 'window of opportunity' for European center-left establishments to enforce moderation/censorship policies on media. There are definitely efforts that have been done in the past / are underway in thhe present, but this 'limited opportunity' is the stability/longevity of these dominant coalitions to do so before the ongoing political trends of European establishment delegitimization, the rise of the right, and the demographic turnover change many of the base conditions.
I won't make a position of what will or will not succeed in the next five years, especially with Donald Trump and US (social) media companies as a foil for European nativist efforts, but I wouldn't be surprised if moderation propositions run into consistently increased resistance beyond five years from now.
TRUST IN THE NEWS
Despite a clear decline over the last decade, we find that levels of trust in news across markets are currently stable at 40%. Indeed, they have been unchanged for the last three years. But we do find significant differences at a national level. Finland has amongst the highest levels of trust (67%), with Hungary (22%), Greece (22%), and other countries in Eastern Europe bumping along the bottom. Some African countries such as Nigeria (68%), and Kenya (65%) also have high trust scores, but it is important to bear in mind that these are more educated, English-speaking survey samples so are not directly comparable. In these countries, we also find that high trust levels often co-exist with lower levels of press freedom. In Nigeria, for example, RSF (Reporters Without Borders) says governmental interference in the news media is significant.
In examining changes over time, we find that some bigger European countries such as the UK and Germany have seen a significant decline in levels of trust around news (-16pp and -15pp respectively since 2015). In both countries, politics has become more divided, with the media often caught in the crossfire. There was a brief uptick at the beginning of the COVID pandemic as the value of news became heightened for many users, and trust levels have been largely stable since. In Finland and Norway trust levels were already high before the pandemic bump. Here, COVID also seems to have halted any declines, and trust has been maintained or improved since the pandemic.
Remember from earlier, that the 'stable ever since' was '4 points lower than during covid.'
WHAT THE MEDIA COULD DO TO INCREASE TRUST
This is the last section I'll cover due to post size, but I'll quote it in full due to salience.
Whilst recognising that some of the reasons for low trust lie outside the control of many newsrooms (e.g. politicians stoking distrust), we asked survey respondents to give their views on areas the news media itself could improve. The top four themes are consistent across countries and also with previous research.
Impartiality: The most frequently mentioned audience complaint relates to the perception that news media push their own agenda rather than presenting evidence in a balanced way. Many respondents say that journalists need to leave their personal feelings at the door. Avoiding loaded or sensationalist language was a repeated theme.
Accuracy and truth telling: Audiences would like journalists to focus on the facts, avoid speculation and hearsay, and to verify and fact-check stories before publishing. Fact-checking the false claims of others was another suggestion to improve the trust of a particular brand.
Transparency: Respondents would like to see more evidence for claims, including fuller disclosure of sources, and better transparency over funding and conflicts of interest. More prominent corrections when publications get things wrong would be appreciated, along with clearer and more distinct labelling around news and opinion.
Better reporting: Respondents wanted journalists to spend their time investigating powerful people and providing depth rather than chasing algorithms for clicks. Employing more beat reporters who were true specialists in their field was another suggestion for improving trust.
All in all, a good and refreshing bit of frankness of some of the challenges, and things that are in the study's audience (media corporations and journalists) to take away.
Which, of course, is why this section ends with this-
Impartiality, accuracy, transparency, and original reporting are what the public expects, even if many people think that the media continue to fall short. The good news is that these are things many journalists and news media would like to offer people.
I hear a 'but the bad news' coming on...
The challenge is that, especially in polarised societies, there is no clear common agreement on what these terms mean. Improving ‘truth telling’ for one group, for example, could end up alienating another. Adding ‘transparency’ features (see the example below) can end up providing more information for hostile groups to take out of context or weaponise.
Well, they can't annoy the wrong people with truth telling, or let hostile groups use transparency to take things out of context. Better to annoy the right people, and let no one else benefit from the transparency when hostile groups point and accuse.
Le sigh.
This break down ends here. There are ten more pages of the EXSUM, but this is already at 45k words and I doubt I'd get through the rest... and its already 45k words. Plus, what remains transitions more into the clearly business-model-focused stuff, albeit a lot of it dealing with AI.
Instead of carrying on, I'll leave with an endorsement. Despite how I feel about that end section, there is a lot of good data to go over here, and more topics of interest. Chances are if you've read this far, you'd be willing to do so further if any of the topics catch your eye. Do so! Here's the link to the study one last time, and I'll end on the remaining sections.
- NEWS AVOIDANCE AND LOW INTEREST IN THE NEWS
- PERSONALISATION AND THE ROLE OF AI
- ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE NEWS
- AI-DRIVEN AGGREGATORS INCREASE THEIR REACH
- THE SMARTPHONE DEEPENS ITS HOLD ON OUR TIME
- PAYING FOR ONLINE NEWS AND THE ROLE OF BUNDLING
- LOCAL NEWS UNDER PRESSURE
2rafa
1hr ago
The Christian population of the Middle East has been leaving since the late years of the Ottoman Empire, a process that has only accelerated since the rise of Islamism post-Qutb after the middle of the 20th century and especially since 1979.
The War on Terror was the death knell for ‘humanitarian’ US regime change opps because it was the moment it became clear that the State Dept, CIA and DoD no longer had the appetite for actual population transformation. There were people who pushed for it. Ann Coulter after 9/11: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity”. But when it came to it, nobody had the guts to do it and it seemed like a lot of work when you could get some peace corps Yale grads at State to fund a few schools to teach women how to sew, fund girls sports teams, give the top ten high school students in the country scholarships to Georgetown and call it a day.
ABigGuy4U
1hr ago
The bombardment Iran is getting isn’t even close to what Taiwan would get. It would look more like Iraq or Kosovo, but in a much smaller area.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1hr ago
Agree with everything you've said.
I'm slightly more optimistic on the USA. China might be as well drilled, which negates this, but the USA is so dialled. Their institutional culture in the military works damn well. It's full of infinite flaws I'm sure you can name, but they make everything they do look so easy, and then you see any other nation on earth (Israeli airforce is the rare exception) struggle to do what the US does on a regular Tuesday.
You are right though, even that is showing signs of rot.
Total war is "a factory fight" and I think it's going more that way thanks to the increasing sophistication of drones/missiles/interceptors. Also scary when we think about who has the most and the best factories. Yikes!
2rafa
1hr ago
Libya was already relatively internally divided, Gaddafi was just a great autocrat. Iran has far fewer internal divisions than Libya did in 2011.
functor
1hr ago
There is absolutely no reason to do a direct assault of a small hilly island. The only sensible way to take Taiwan is a siege which the Chinese could even conduct from their homeland with anti ship missiles launched from the shores. Taiwan isn't going to last that long without international trade.
Lizzardspawn
1hr ago
Ahh yes. I haven't been able to find direct quotes for eternity. And we are talking for punchlines of popular jokes here for example.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1hr ago
Earlier today I was looking for a particular high resolution image. I don't know when Google removed resolution information from the results it returned, but I had to use DuckDuckGo and then TinEye to actually find what I was looking for--and even then, the level of linkrot I encountered was astonishing. A few weeks ago, I was looking for the source of a specific text string, but Google kept ignoring the way I put the string into quotation marks.
The enshittification of Google has been underway for a while now, but I feel like over the past few years it has accelerated precipitously, and AI is just the tip of that iceberg. Google search no longer exists to return useful results (even if that was not its main purpose to begin with, I at least got results as an acceptable tradeoff for having my privacy sold). Google search now exists exclusively to sell me things, or to sell my attention, so increasingly it gets to do neither.
SophisticatedHillbilly
1hr ago
if a model was right, you wouldn't give up and call it merely useful.
This is only true if a correct model is useful, which is certainly not always true. Even further: the most correct model isn’t necessarily the most useful model even when it is useful.
If I remember correctly evolutionary simulations consistently show a fully accurate perception of the world is generally actively harmful even when there’s no associated resource cost. Autistic analyzers often have more accurate models of social dynamics but do worse at socializing. Blind optimism, undeserved confidence unfounded worries etc are all extremely useful, and moving to a more accurate view is less useful.
It’s possible to have wrong and useless models of course, but that’s the point of the adage.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1hr ago
It would be 2000 cruise missiles a day for three weeks before there was any kind of landing attempt.
And the presumed response looks like 2000 anti-ship missiles (or pre-placed torpedos) denying navigation to the entire strait, plus long-range anti-ship missiles used to declare a blockade of Chinese ports (see the Black Sea, but with potentially less regard for continued commercial traffic). Which isn't to say that would work out either, but the idea that Taiwan's defenses would crumble immediately like Iran's have isn't a guarantee either.
MollieTheMare
1hr ago
If the setup is something where an average sized man has to lift a moderate sized woman, and you're in a position to get the lifting joint below her center of gravity, I do think even a moderately fit man should be able to do it. I assume the original euphemism was more or less a proxy for moderately fit man is able to generally man handle, which isn't that high of a standard.
There's different levels though.
With zero training I would think most guys could lift a moderate sized woman off their feet.
At a 225# bench I would expect you could basically floor press a cooperative calisthenics/yoga woman where you have her hands in yours and she is in a sort of planche/peacock/crow pose. Seems like it would be amusing in a "I’m flying, Jack!" sort of way.
Assuming you are just by grabbing her (handleless) hips and she is not cooperatively holding a nice grasshopper pose or plank but flopping around or bratting. I wouldn't be supersized if it took the equivalent of a 300# bench to cleanly press a slightly larger than average 175# woman from laying directly on top of you. It's not really the absolute load that's limiting, the leverage is just bad. It would be worse than touching a bench press to below your navel. It's hard to find good statistics on it, but a 3 plate bench is low single digit percentage of men. Totally doable for most men, but does require serious training.
It's like the difference between getting a cooperative partner into a fireman's carry and a lifeless dummy. Pound for pound the latter feels at least twice as hard.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
1hr ago
Ahh yes not sure how it got here.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1hr ago
I wonder if anyone has tried gpui?
It powers https://zed.dev/ which I likewise have never used, but seems interesting and more performant than electronslop.
Cheap missile spam backed by cheap drone spam that may be followed with armor and infantry on the ground with active air support if needed.
At least, that's what Anduril is clearly banking on. They're making missiles that are also drones.
The technical issue of holding territory if you manage to capture it is still hard to solve.
But I imagine the opening stages of a non-nuclear war between peer powers looks like a scaled up version of what happened to Iran. Missile swarm exchanges targeting enemy Command and Control and defensive systems, coupled with cyberattacks and other sabotage to maximize penetration.
And of course, if you can smuggle a ton of drones into the target country in advance and set them up near vulnerable targets you're able to leverage the carnage even further.
Knock out the defenses in the first wave, then successive waves will be all the more destructive and you can diversify targets. Seems like it soon becomes an all-or-nothing exchange b/c if you can kill off their ability to launch retaliating strikes, you can just keep on striking without fear.
Then drones of various sizes to reconnoiter and identify pockets of potential resistance, and start softening up the troops who actually stay at their posts. I don't know how you maintain morale for human infantry when the chain of command is tossed into chaos and they can see the writing on the wall when the FPV drones start buzzing in for the kill.
Add on the extra consideration that you can fit missile launchers and drone swarms on shipping containers and suddenly the task of predicting where the strikes will originate from is more difficult.
Civilian ships are potential launching points for missiles and drones, so it might legitimately become doctrine to attack any cargo ships inside your air defense pocket just in case they could be used to retaliate.
Hell, the scariest thing I can imagine is using missiles coordinated with drone swarms to penetrate armored facilities so the drones can sweep through and murder everyone inside.
And yeah, I would not want to be a head of state or military leader of one of the belligerent countries, when poking my head out of my deep mountain bunker could be instantly fatal. Traveling by air would be right the fuck out, and any attempt to move over land is inherently exposing me to missiles or drone salvos.
People say that decapitation strikes have been a feature of warfare for eons, but we're seeing the ability to reach out and touch someone from absurd distances, and DEFINITELY the ability to coordinate the simultaneous strike much more effectively. And redundancy. Want to be SURE a guy is dead? Fire more missiles, then have drones on cleanup duty.
Safest place for a leader to be would probably be on a silent nuclear-powered submarine deep enough underwater to avoid depth charges.
Except... oh shit.
I take it back, the safest place for the leader to be will be on the fucking MOON while the conflict is active.
More options
Context Copy link