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A antropóloga Letícia Cesarino, professora da UFSC (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina) e autora de “O mundo do avesso: verdade e política na era digital”, publicado em outubro de 2022, afirma em entrevista ao Nexo que diversas dimensões se entrecruzam para formar o fenômeno da realidade paralela, como um contexto de crise política e social, que se arrasta desde 2013, e questões cognitivas.

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'Há grupos impermeáveis a sinais externos da realidade'

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A antropóloga Letícia Cesarino, professora da UFSC, fala ao 'Nexo' sobre a lógica bolsonarista de acreditar nos mais diferentes absurdos e espalhar desinformação para tentar contestar o resultado da eleição

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Endossar mentiras x esclarecer falsidades

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Endossar mentiras x esclarecer falsidades

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O negacionismo se prolifera nas grandes plataformas digitais e muito deste conteúdo não é derrubado pelas políticas das empresas. O debate é delicado e precisa ir além da discussão do conteúdo.

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O impacto da desinformação na democracia brasileira

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A democracia está em risco no Brasil? E qual o papel da desinformação neste processo? A IJNet estreou, dia 12 de outubro, uma série de lives no Instagram com a intenção de discutir os desafios dos jornalistas brasileiros neste ano eleitoral. A primeira convidada foi a jornalista Cristina Tardáguila,…

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A primeira vítima da guerra é a verdade, afirma um velho ditado jornalístico. Embora o mais correto fosse dizer que a verdade é vítima recorrente em qualquer sociedade organizada, porque a mentira política é uma arte tão velha quanto a civilização. Há coisas que aconteceram, e outras que não; mas os fatos, reais ou inventados, influenciam a nossa percepção e opinião.

https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2018/06/08/cultura/1528467298_389944.html

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Soldados alemães durante a quarta batalha de Ypres, em outubro de 1918. Paul Thompson / Getty Images

A primeira vítima da guerra é a verdade, afirma um velho ditado jornalístico. Embora o mais correto fosse dizer que a verdade é vítima recorrente em qualquer sociedade organizada, porque a mentira política é uma arte tão velha quanto a civilização. A verdade é um conceito fugidio na metafísica e mutante nas ciências - uma nova descoberta pode anular o que se dava como certo -, mas no dia-a-dia o assunto é bem diferente: há coisas que aconteceram, e outras que não; mas os fatos, reais ou inventados, influenciam a nossa percepção e opinião.

Desde a Antiguidade, verdade e mentira se misturaram muitíssimas vezes, e essas realidades falsas influenciaram nosso presente. Assim já escreveu o grande historiador francês Paul Veyne em seu ensaio Os Gregos Acreditavam em Seus Mitos? (Unesp): "Os homens não encontram a verdade, a constroem, como constroem sua história".

Chegados a este ponto, convém fazer uma distinção entre notícias falsas e propaganda: ambas crescem e se multiplicam no mesmo ecossistema, mas não são exatamente iguais. A propaganda procura convencer, ser eficaz, e para isso pode recorrer a todo tipo de instrumento, da arte e do cinema aos pasquins e redes sociais. As notícias falsas, um dos ramos da propaganda, são diferentes: procuram enganar, criar outra realidade. A preocupação com a perpetuação desses equívocos e com os mecanismos que os criam e multiplicam não é nova: Réflexions d'Un Historien Sur les Fausses Nouvelles de la Guerre, ("reflexões de um historiador sobre a notícias falsas das guerra", Allia, 2012) é o título de um pequeno e influente ensaio que Marc Bloch publicou originalmente... em 1921.

Esse historiador, assassinado pelos nazistas em 1944, foi um dos mais influentes do século XX. Impulsionou a Escola dos Anais, que mudou o foco da pesquisa do passado para a vida cotidiana, e retornou das trincheiras da Primeira Guerra Mundial alucinado com a importância que as notícias falsas haviam tido. Isso o levou a refletir sobre sua origem e difusão, num texto que poderia ter sido escrito na era do , de Vladimir Putin e de Donald Trump, nestes tempos das redes sociais e de mensagens virais. "As notícias falsas mobilizaram as massas. As notícias falsas, em todas as suas formas, encheram a vida da humanidade. Como nascem? De que elementos extraem sua substância? Como se propagam e crescem?", escreve, para afirmar um pouco mais adiante: "Um erro só se propaga e se amplifica, só ganha vida com uma condição: encontrar um caldo de cultivo favorável na sociedade onde se expande. Nele, de forma inconsciente, os homens expressam seus preconceitos, seus ódios, seus temores, todas as suas emoções". Em outras palavras, as notícias falsas necessitam de gente que queira acreditar nelas.

Mudar a história

O século XX e o que já vivemos do XXI são a era das mentiras em massa. Três dos grandes conflitos em que os Estados Unidos se meteram neste período começaram com invenções: a guerra de Cuba (1898), com a manipulação dos jornais; a guerra do Vietnã (1955-1975), com o incidente do golfo de Tonkin, e a invasão do Iraque de 2003, com as inexistentes armas de destruição em massa de Saddam Hussein. "A guerra contra a Espanha [em 1898] foi obra de Hearst e de Pulitzer", escreveu o repórter Manuel Leguineche em seu ensaio sobre o nascimento do jornalismo sensacionalista, Yo Pondré la Guerra ("eu porei a guerra", El País Aguilar). "Foi sua grande oportunidade de mudar a história, de criar uma psicose de guerra, de fabricá-la, por meio de sensacionalismo, tiragem, circulação milionária, venda maciça, chute no estômago do leitor".

Ao mesmo tempo em que surgiam os jornais de circulação maciça, nascia também um certo ceticismo em relação a eles. Era como se alguns se empenhassem em demonstrar que a verdade estava em outro lugar. Essa desconfiança se prolonga até nossos dias, com aqueles que acreditam erroneamente que a imprensa conta mentiras, e que as redes sociais oferecem verdades. Com o telégrafo, chegou a possibilidade de enviar rapidamente histórias através de longas distâncias; com o linotipo foi possível imprimir maciçamente; e com os novos meios de transporte essas publicações puderam ser distribuídas em numerosos lugares. Mas nesse mesmo momento, no final do século XIX, surgiu a desconfiança quanto àquilo que contavam, a mesma que nutre agora os que procuram essa outra verdade no Facebook, que para alguns é a única janela para o mundo. É muito significativa, nesse sentido, uma cena de Um Estudo em Vermelho, o primeiro romance de Sherlock Holmes, publicado em 1887, em que o detetive e Watson repassam os diferentes jornais - The Daily Telegraph, Daily News, Standard - e todos contam uma versão falsa do crime que estão investigando, impulsionada por motivos políticos: uns culpam os europeus, outros os estrangeiros, ou os liberais. Nenhum cita uma pista confiável.

Uma das grandes tragédias do século XX, as matanças maciças promovidas pelos grandes totalitarismos, conseguiu se esconder detrás de notícias falsas. As ditaduras nazista e soviética não só fabricaram falsidades tremendas como também foram capazes de construir outra realidade, em que o verdadeiro e o falso eram elementos acessórios. Como apontou o escritor francês Emmanuel Carrère, "na URSS não se aboliu a propriedade privada, aboliu-se a realidade". Agora pode parecer quase incrível que enquanto Stálin assassinava e deportava milhões de pessoas a bondade do socialismo se mantinha como um dogma em grandes setores do Ocidente. Muita gente achou, de boa ou má fé, que a realidade era, nesse caso, uma notícia falseada. Assim explicava o historiador Tony Judt em Pensando o Século XX (Objetiva): "Os que entenderam corretamente o século tiveram que imaginar um mundo para o qual não existiam precedentes. Tiveram que supor que essa situação insólita e claramente absurda estava acontecendo na realidade, em vez de dar como certo, como todos os demais, que era grotescamente inimaginável".

Mensageiros do desastre

A historiadora francesa Annette Becker estudou a influência que a propaganda da Primeira Guerra Mundial teve sobre a Segunda. As notícias falsas difundidas contra os alemães entre 1914 e 1918, quando eram acusados de todo tipo de brutalidades com fins propagandísticos, tiveram um efeito negativo na percepção das atrocidades que foram efetivamente cometidas entre 1939 e 1945, sobretudo em relação ao Holocausto. Um exemplo disso foi a descrença que recaiu sobre os primeiros agentes poloneses que trouxeram a notícia do extermínio de judeus por parte dos nazistas. Em seu livro Messagers du Désastre ("mensageiros do desastre", Fayard), que acaba de sair na França, Becker relata a história do Jan Karski, um herói polonês que arriscou a vida para levar a notícia do Holocausto a Londres. Não acreditaram nele quando informou aos aliados sobre o que ocorria. Um alto oficial britânico lhe explicou: "Senhor, durante a Primeira Guerra Mundial difundimos a propaganda de que soldados alemães esmagavam crianças belgas contra os muros. Acredito que fizemos bem. Isso nos ajudou a debilitar o moral do inimigo, a aumentar o ódio contra os alemães. Precisamos de relatos como o seu". Karski acrescentou: "Notava-se claramente que ele não acreditava em mim". De novo, uma notícia verdadeira era percebida como falsa.

Mas as regras que Marc Bloch intuiu há um século - que as notícias falsas precisam de uma sociedade disposta a acreditar nelas - começaram a ser aplicadas muito antes da era da comunicação de massas, já desde os criadores do pensamento histórico, primeiro Heródoto e depois Tucídides. "A democracia ateniense tem uma espécie de momento institucional, de marco crucial, que na verdade foi uma genial construção narrativa", afirma o helenista Óscar Martínez, professor de grego, presidente da delegação de Madri da Sociedade Espanhola de Estudos Clássicos e autor de Hé roes que Miran a los Ojos de los Dioses ("heróis que olham nos olhos dos deuses", Edaf).

"Trata-se do elogio dos tiranicidas Harmódio e Aristógito, que são mostrados como os fundadores heroicos da democracia, já que assassinaram o tirano de Atenas. Mas quando Heródoto e Tucídides narram este episódio, se vê claramente que há coisas que não batem: não mataram o tirano, e sim o seu irmão, e a tirania durou quatro anos. E deixam expresso que as causas do magnicídio foram mais um assunto pessoal, inclusive amoroso", prossegue Martínez. Com a vontade de investigar - a palavra que Heródoto emprega é historie - nasceu a luta contra as notícias falsas.

Na antiga Roma, os governantes estavam muito conscientes da importância da informação e de como era essencial adaptá-la às suas necessidades políticas, independentemente da realidade. "Em Roma, as notícias se transmitiam fundamentalmente através das imagens", explica o pesquisador Néstor F. Marqués, que publicou recentemente Un Año en la Antigua Roma: La Vida Cotidiana de los Romanos a Través de su Calendario (Espasa). "Nem todo mundo sabia ler ou escrever, por isso a informação visual era muito importante. A forma mais rápida de difundir a chegada de um novo imperador era cunhar moedas com sua cara", prossegue. E aí Marqués encontra um exemplo típico de notícia falsa: "O imperador Septímio Severo, nascido em Leptis Magna e que nada tinha a ver com seu antecessor, o malogrado Cômodo, para legitimar seu poder decidiu espalhar a ideia de que ele próprio era o irmão perdido de Cômodo, filho ilegítimo de Marco Aurélio, e por isso a pessoa mais adequada para ocupar o cargo. Nas primeiras moedas que cunhou, se fez retratar com traços muito parecidos com os de Marco Aurélio".

Notícias e jograis

Também na Idade Média as notícias se propagavam com surpreendente eficácia, embora as condições materiais não acompanhassem o movimento informativo. Claude Gauvard, professora emérita da Sorbonne, investigou as formas de transmissão de informação nesse período: "Um cavalo podia percorrer 30 quilômetros por dia, mas o tempo que se levava para transmitir uma informação podia se acelerar dependendo do interesse da notícia", conta por e-mail. As ordens mendicantes tinham um papel importante na disseminação de informações, assim como os jograis, os peregrinos e os vagabundos, porque todos eles percorriam grandes distâncias. As cidades também tinham correios organizados e selos para lacrar mensagens e tentar certificar a veracidade das correspondências. Graças a tudo isto, a circulação de boatos era intensa e politicamente relevante. Gauvard cita como exemplo de fake n ews clássica da era medieval a história do rei, conde ou senhor que desaparece na batalha e reaparece muito depois, idoso e transformado.

Um dos motivos para a construção de notícias falsas naquele período era tentar justificar atos que, de outra forma, seriam intoleráveis, como o magnicídio. "O duque de Borgonha, depois de encarregar em 1407 o assassinato do duque de Orleans, levou a cabo uma campanha epistolar: dirigiu-se às cidades do reino, aos príncipes, à Igreja, até ao Papa. Nessas cartas, argumentava que o duque de Orleans era um tirano que tentou assassinar a família real", diz Gauvard, acrescentando que houve muitos outros casos de campanhas certeiras de desinformação, que chegaram inclusive a afetar Joana d'Arc. Mas a historiadora acredita que o exemplo mais claro para demonstrar a importância das mentiras são as caças às bruxas e as calúnias contra os judeus, autênticas campanhas de desinformação com resultados catastróficos. "Podem ter sido movimentos populares, mas foram manipulados pelas autoridades", afirma.

Em um livro recém-lançado, Crimen e Ilusión. El Arte de la Verdad en el Siglo de Oro (Marcial Pons), Felipe Pereda, professor de arte espanhola na Universidade Harvard, estudou a fundo outro escandaloso e apaixonante caso em que a construção de uma notícia falsa teve implicações políticas. Ocorreu na Madri do século XVII, e é um exemplo claro de perseguição antissemita. "Em 1632 ocorreu um auto de fé em que foram queimados quatro marranos (judeus convertidos) portugueses, e outros foram enviados às galés. Todos eles eram acusados de terem profanado um crucifixo dois anos antes. As autoridades sustentavam que o objeto teria resistido a ser queimado e que inclusive teria falado com essas pessoas. Aquele foi um dos grandes escândalos do primeiro Governo do conde-duque de Olivares, acusado de favorecer os banqueiros marranos em detrimento dos genoveses", explica Pereda.

A perseguição na rua das Infantas, onde viviam aqueles judeus, teve motivações políticas. Como explica o investigador do antissemitismo na Espanha Uriel Macías, o eco daquele caso foi tamanho que Calderón de la Barca escreveu uma obra, El Nuevo Palacio del Retiro, e Quevedo redigiu um furioso panfleto antissemita, Execración Contra los Judíos. Em 1650, Quevedo também publicou La Isla de los Monopantos, uma obra em que pela primeira vez se fala de um complô universal judaico para dominar o mundo, teoria que seria explorada a fundo pelos Protocolos dos Sábios do Sião, uma das grandes falsificações da história, que encontrou ampla difusão no começo do século XX. Historicamente o antissemitismo foi um terreno fértil para plantar mentiras.

A Inquisição se aproveitava dele e ao mesmo tempo o estimulava. "Na imensa maioria das lendas antissemitas é facilmente identificável como as mentiras são forjadas", diz Macías, relatando que, depois do auto de fé de 1632, foram convocados concursos literários sobre o tema, e a Inquisição distribuiu panfletos anticristãos, supostamente escritos por judeus, que tinham sido integralmente falsificados para agitar e convencer o povo. Aquele processo contra os marranos não só se baseou em provas inventadas como também foi um arremedo jurídico: a única testemunha era uma criança menor de 10 anos, com graves problemas cognitivos, algo teoricamente inaceitável pela Inquisição, que violou suas próprias normas.

As casas dos judeus foram destruídas, e em seu lugar foi construído o convento dos Capuchinos da Paciência de Cristo, com uma capela situada exatamente no mesmo espaço onde ocorreu o sacrilégio imaginário. Ali foram instaladas quatro pinturas enormes, feitas por Francisco Rizi, Francisco Camilo, Andrés de Vargas e Francisco Hernández. "Os quadros reconstroem com documentadíssimo cuidado a cena do crime, descrevem os detalhes dos fatos, identificam cada um de seus protagonistas e, o que é mais importante, transformam os espectadores em testemunhas dos acontecimentos", escreve Pereda em seu ensaio. O ponto de vista é o da única testemunha da profanação. Três dos quadros se encontram no acervo do Museu do Prado, já que a capela foi destruída no século XIX. Não foram necessárias naquela época as redes sociais para construir do zero a mentira perfeita, para criar uma realidade incontestável, embora falsa.

Outro exemplo da eficácia da Inquisição na disseminação de histórias falsas é o caso do Santo Menino da Guarda, ocorrido em Toledo. Vários judeus e convertidos foram acusados de assassinar um menino que nunca existiu (e que, apesar disso, continua sendo venerado atualmente). Politicamente esse fato inventado em 1490 teve um impacto formidável: foi um dos pretextos para a expulsão dos judeus em 1492. "Nunca ninguém deu pela falta de menino nenhum, nem se encontrou qualquer corpo", conta a historiadora Mercedes García-Arenal, do Conselho Superior de Pesquisas Científicas da Espanha (CSIC). "Mas montou-se um processo com confissões sob tortura, e vários judeus e judeus convertidos foram queimados. Este fato serviu para sossegar as vozes rebeladas contra a Inquisição e para decretar a expulsão dos judeus."

Os dividendos políticos das notícias falsas são elevados, e já era assim bem antes da Internet, mas elas sempre necessitaram de um bom caldo de cultivo. As mentiras que se espalham e convencem as massas não surgiram com as redes sociais.

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A primeira vítima da guerra é a verdade, afirma um velho ditado jornalístico. Embora o mais correto fosse dizer que a verdade é vítima recorrente em qualquer sociedade organizada, porque a mentira política é uma arte tão velha quanto a civilização.

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Estudos e artigos fornecem um enorme conjunto de dados rigorosos que ajudam a quantificar o que acontece quando as comunidades locais têm notícias locais fortes – e o que acontece quando as perdem. Compreender o impacto de notícias locais de qualidade em nossa democracia nesses tipos de maneiras específicas, orientadas por dados e matizadas é fundamental quando pensamos em como construir um futuro mais equitativo e sustentável de notícias locais que realmente atenda a todas as comunidades em um momento de ameaça e incerteza na democracia.

https://democracyfund.org/idea/how-we-know-journalism-is-good-for-democracy/

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At Democracy Fund, we see every day how local news strengthens democracy. People rely on local news to figure out who to vote for, how to speak up at school board meetings, how to run for local office, where to find vaccines, when to organize for change, and more. From daily reporting that equips people to act, to huge investigations that reveal corruption, the health of local news is bound up with the health of our democracy.

Unfortunately, communities across the United States are steadily losing access to this kind of civic information. According to data released in June 2022, at least one fifth of the U.S. - 70 million people - live in a community without a newspaper or a community at risk of losing theirs.

Since 2018, we've been tracking academic studies that show in stark terms the impact journalism has on our democracy. This research review has become a critical guide for funders, policymakers, communities, and journalists who care about creating a healthier democracy. In 2022, we overhauled this resource, including adding a section that more clearly names the harms journalism has caused in our communities, especially communities of color.

These studies and articles provide an enormous set of rigorous data that help quantify what happens when local communities have strong local news - and what happens when they lose it. Understanding the impact of quality local news on our democracy in these sorts of specific, data driven, nuanced ways is critical as we think about how to build a more equitable and sustainable future of local news that truly serves all communities at a moment of threat and uncertainty in democracy.

Do you have additional research to add, or are interested in how you can be part of the solution? Email us at LocalNewsLab [@] democracyfund.org.
(Ed. Note: This post was originally published June 26, 2018. It was last revised on September 15, 2022. We will continue to update the date in this note for future additions. Andrea Lorenz, PhD candidate at UNC Chapel Hill Hussman School of Journalism and Media, contributed research and guidance for the update of this post in summer 2022.)
Strong local journalism = more people turning out to vote.

Weak local journalism = fewer people vote.

Cities and towns with shrinking newsrooms had "significantly reduced political competition in mayoral races" and lower voter turnout. Meghan E. Rubado and Jay T. Jennings used a data set including 11 local newspapers in California matched up with the municipalities they cover to study the impact of declines in newsroom staffing over 20 years. As Josh Benton notes in his overview of the research , the study is notable because most similar research focuses on newspaper closings, not just shrinking staff. In a follow-up paper , Meghan E. Rubado and Jay T. Jennings interviewed working journalists to understand the impact of newspaper employment cuts on the communities they cover. Journalists they talked to described "corruption, mismanagement, lower turnout, and incumbency advantages" as outcomes of reduced government coverage. (We also recommend Nieman Lab's excellent summary of the paper .)

Thorough local journalism helps people be less biased when considering candidates.

Quality local journalism can counter divisive national narratives that aim to stoke polarization.

Every dollar spent on local news produces hundreds of dollars in public benefit by exposing corruption & keeping an eye on government spending.

"Congressmen who are less covered by the local press work less for their constituencies," researchers from MIT and Stockholm University documented in a study by evaluating their voting records, participation in hearings and more. They also found that federal spending was lower in areas where there was less press coverage of the local members of congress.

People feel a stronger sense of community in places with strong local journalism.

Local news keeps communities informed during times of upheaval, like disasters, protests, and pandemics - when people need critical information to engage their communities and leaders.

Local news isn't inherently good for communities just because it's local though, studies show.

Journalism clearly has positive outcomes for our democracy, but it is not in and of itself inherently good. Studies show how local journalism outlets have harmed many communities with their coverage. Shuttering local newspapers is not the only crisis in local news - we also have to work to reimagine and rebuild how newsrooms serve communities, who gets to lead those newsrooms, and how reporting reflects the diverse needs of our nation. It is not enough to simply replace what has been lost - the following studies remind us that we must build something even better as we move forward.

What's on the horizon for journalism in our democracy?

These findings call us to take even more seriously the erosion of people's access to news and information. The faltering of newspapers, the consolidation of TV and radio, and the rising power of social media platforms are not just commercial issues driven by the market; they are democratic issues with profound implications for our communities.

We have seen a lot of transformation and reasons for hope over the past few years since this post was originally published. News leaders are thinking about how to serve their communities, and reckoning with failures of the past. Journalism funders are coming together to fund projects to revitalize local news ecosystems . And funders who haven't traditionally focused on journalism are joining in as well, realizing they will not achieve the change they seek in healthcare, education and more without information about their focuses. The research above makes the case for why we must continue working to expand support for quality local news that truly reflects and serves its communities. If you want to know more about how, or want to add additional research to this list, reach out to us at LocalNewsLab [@] democracyfund.org.

Learn More

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How we know journalism is good for democracy - Democracy Fund

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At Democracy Fund, we see every day how local news strengthens democracy. People rely on local news to figure out who to vote for, how to speak up at school board meetings, how to run for local office, where to find vaccines, when to organize for change, and more.

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Confiança nas notícias em plataformas digitais

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Confiança nas notícias em plataformas digitais

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A diferença de confiança entre as notícias em geral e as notícias nas plataformas é maior para alguns serviços (Facebook) e menor para outros (Google), e diferente em alguns países (a confiança é muito maior na Índia do que em outros países) e para alguns públicos (pessoas mais jovens, com formação universitária e politicamente interessadas são mais propensas a confiar nas notícias dentro e fora das plataformas), mas, surpreendentemente, os níveis mais baixos de confiança são consistentemente encontrados entre as pessoas que não usam plataformas.

https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/trust-gap-how-and-why-news-digital-platforms-viewed-more-sceptically-versus-news-general

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Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

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Executive summary and key findings ↑

What role, if any, do social media, search engines, and messaging apps play in eroding the public's confidence in the news media? In virtual roundtable discussions with small groups of journalists and publishers last year (Toff et al. 2021a), many expressed concern that digital platforms were at least partly to blame for declining levels of trust in news in many places around the world (Newman et al. 2022). Some worried that platforms enable bad-faith criticism of journalism to circulate more easily and insidiously while polluting the information environment with low quality substitutes for factual reporting. Others saw platforms as undermining news audiences' connections with their brands, even as they often saw digital media intermediaries as essential to reaching segments of the public least likely to tune in through legacy modes such as print or broadcast.

In this report, the latest instalment of our ongoing Trust in News Project, we explore these questions from the perspective of audiences. Drawing on an original dataset of survey responses collected in the summer of 2022 across four countries - Brazil, India, the UK, and the US - we examine the relationship between trust in news and how people think about news on digital platforms, especially Facebook, Google, WhatsApp, and YouTube, some of the most widely used platforms around the world. What we find is somewhat nuanced; how people think about information on platforms varies considerably. It depends on the platform, it depends on the country, it depends on the audiences within those countries, and it depends on the kinds of news those audiences are encountering in these varying spaces.

At the same time, apart from these contextual differences, there is a striking commonality. We find a consistent 'trust gap' between how much people in all four countries trust information in the news media in general and how much they trust news found via these digital companies, which they tend to be more sceptical towards. We find such gaps even as we also find that considerable majorities still hold positive feelings towards the platforms themselves.

While these findings may at first seem counter-intuitive, they make sense when considered alongside other findings in our report concerning the reasons why people say they use platforms. These vary from connecting with others (especially important for WhatsApp and Facebook) to entertainment and passing time (YouTube ranks highly for this); getting news and information from platforms is often a secondary concern. Large numbers can and do keep up with news via the sources of information the companies deliver (Ross Arguedas et al. 2022; Duchovnay et al. 2021), yet news itself is rarely central to most people's experiences while using these products. That makes platforms far more important to news organisations in search of broadening their audiences than news is to the platforms themselves. That may also be why many feel more positive towards platforms generally, even though they also see significant problems associated with them, as we also show in this report. This includes problems around false and misleading information, harassment, contentiousness when it comes to talking about politics, and other issues. Many users find platforms enjoyable or helpful in their day-to-day lives despite these concerns, no matter what they think of the news they might find there.

To be sure, the trust gap between news overall and news on platforms is larger for some services (Facebook) and smaller for others (Google), and different in some countries (trust is much higher in India than the other countries) and for some audiences (younger, college educated, politically interested people are more likely to trust news both on and off platforms), but, strikingly, the lowest levels of trust are consistently found among people who do not use platforms at all.

Some may shun platforms precisely because they do not trust them. Others may be expressing a value judgement about the kinds of news found on platforms, which they perceive as distinctly lower in quality compared to that found elsewhere. (And certainly platform algorithms prioritise some types of content over others.) But our findings also point to the degree to which many may base their evaluations of news on platforms on ideas they hold about the nature of the information in these spaces - ideas that may be rooted in culture and conversation as much as, or even more so than, direct (or past) experiences using these services. Such ideas influence how people behave in these digital spaces and what they expect to find there. While the views of non-users of platforms may seem less important than the perspectives of those with the most experience using these services, non-users are in many cases a majority of the public, and their beliefs about information on platforms may impact ongoing policy debates over how these services should operate.

The importance of ideas about news on platforms also applies to news in general. As our findings also show, many respondents hold quite negative ideas about how journalism is practised in their countries, seeing journalists as manipulators mainly out to serve themselves and the agendas of powerful politicians. While many also say they frequently encounter criticism of the news media on social media in particular - some of which, to be sure, may be wholly legitimate - exposure to such ideas about news appears to circulate widely offline as well, with many citing conversations with ordinary people as one of the main places they encounter such critiques.

Background on this report

The Reuters Institute's Trust in News Project seeks to understand the drivers of trust in news, the factors responsible for its apparent decline in many countries in recent years, the differences in how this plays out in different places around the world, and what might be done about it. We focus on four countries spanning the Global South (Brazil and India) and North (the UK and the US) which, despite large cultural, societal, and political differences, share commonalities in the relevance of digital platforms for how people interact with others, solve daily tasks, and get information. Data from the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2022 shows that significant proportions of the public in all four countries use platforms regularly with smaller but still considerable numbers getting news from them as well.

This report is closely connected to two previous reports we have published in the last nine months. The first, as mentioned above, was based on roundtables we organised with senior managers and journalists from news organisations worldwide, in which they described their main challenges when it comes to building and sustaining trust with the audiences with whom they seek to engage (Toff et al. 2021a). The second was based on qualitative interviews we conducted investigating how less-trusting audiences think about the news they encounter on platforms, the shortcuts they use in making quick judgements about news they come across, and how specific features of platforms shape these experiences (Ross Arguedas et al. 2022). In this document, we explore broader patterns using representative survey data about audience behaviours and perceptions when it comes to social media platforms by summarising results from an original survey we fielded in June and July 2022 across all four countries.

We worked closely with the research firm Ipsos to poll approximately 2,000 respondents per country using broadly representative samples with quotas for (at the minimum) age, gender, region, and other characteristics specific to each country's population. In Brazil and India, surveys were fielded face-to-face in all major regions in each country. Conducting surveys in-person in these countries was particularly important for reaching the comparatively high numbers who do not have internet access at home (22% in Brazil and 67% in India in our samples) or on a personal mobile phone device (14% in Brazil and 33% in India). In the UK and the US, where internet penetration is more ubiquitous, surveys were instead fielded online with samples intended to approximate the national populations in each country. In addition to English, questionnaires were translated into Spanish for the US, Portuguese for Brazil, and into ten languages in India.

Survey questionnaires were designed by the authors of this report to capture respondents' distinct perceptions of individual platforms, their levels of trust towards news on them, reasons why people use them, and the problems they associate with them. We also asked questions about exposure to disagreement and political conversation on platforms and perceptions about journalists and news organisations, some of which may or may not be shaped by experiences using platforms. The questionnaire took on average approximately 15 minutes to complete online and 25 minutes in person. Due to a technical error when the survey was programmed, a small number of questions that we focus on in section three were omitted. For this reason, a separate supplementary survey was also conducted entirely online in the four markets in July 2022. We offer expanded information about the methods used for sampling, fieldwork, and weighting for both surveys in Appendix A.

Summary of key findings

In the pages that follow, we draw on these systematically collected survey data to better understand what people think about news on different platforms in different countries. Below we restate and elaborate on several of the key findings from the sections that follow:

Levels of trust in news on social media, search engines, and messaging apps is consistently lower than audience trust in information in the news media more generally. We found gaps in trust for most platforms in all four countries, with news on Google sometimes at parity with news overall but news on other platforms typically viewed more sceptically. Trust was also considerably higher across the board in India compared to the other three countries.

A considerable portion of this trust gap is explained by lower levels of trust among people who do not use platforms. Many of the same people who lack trust in news encountered via digital media companies - who tend to be older, less educated, and less politically interested - also express less trust in the news regardless of whether found on platforms or through more traditional offline modes.

Despite comparatively lower trust in news on platforms, many hold broadly positive feelings towards them, especially Google and YouTube, as well as WhatsApp in Brazil and India. Relatively small numbers of respondents in all four countries expressed negative feelings towards the technology companies. This might indicate that people's feelings towards platforms are largely unrelated to expectations around what news they may or may not find there.

Many of the most common reasons people say they use platforms have little to do with news. For most platforms, people are more likely to say they use them to connect with other people in their lives or for entertainment or to pass the time rather than to find out information about current affairs. The majority in some countries also say they use platforms for commercial purposes (buying or selling products) or for work or school.

News about politics is viewed as particularly suspect and platforms are seen by many as contentious places for political conversation - at least for those most interested in politics. Rates of trust in news in general are comparatively higher than trust in news when it pertains to coverage of political affairs. This disparity is particularly pronounced in Brazil, where nearly two-thirds of people also say they feel they have to be careful when talking about politics with friends and acquaintances. This is true both in general as well as while using Facebook or WhatsApp. As many as 20-30% of the most politically interested people in all four countries say they have stopped talking to someone on these platforms due to disagreements about politics.

Negative perceptions about journalism are widespread and social media is one of the most often-cited places people say they see or hear criticism of news and journalism. As many as half the respondents in all four countries say they believe journalists try to manipulate audiences to serve the agendas of powerful politicians or care more about getting attention than reporting the facts. Those who use platforms are also more likely to say they often encounter criticism of the news media. However, as news is not central to most people's experience using platforms, rates are not necessarily higher when compared to other sources of criticism about news many say they encounter, including from ordinary people and friends in offline conversations.

Misinformation and harassment are among the leading problems many associate with platforms. Despite positive feelings towards most platforms, large majorities in all four countries agree that false and misleading information, harassment, and platforms using data irresponsibly are 'big problems' in their country for many platforms. In the US and UK, larger percentages singled out Facebook in particular when it came to these problems, whereas elsewhere broader majorities saw such problems as applicable to all four platforms we asked about.

1. What is the trust gap and where is it most pronounced? ↑

In this section we explore levels of trust in news on digital platforms in relation to news in general and what these gaps mean with respect to people's relationships with news in their countries. In general we found that significantly fewer people say they trust news found via platforms compared to information in the news media overall. While gaps are smallest for some widely used services, such as Google or WhatsApp (at least in Brazil and India), the pattern holds across many different platforms in all four countries. We also show in this section how these gaps are particularly related to certain demographics, political preferences, and differing ways that people consume news. News about politics is viewed as particularly suspect, with considerably fewer saying they trust news when it comes to coverage of political affairs compared to news in general.

Trust in news on platforms is low relative to trust in news more generally

Our survey shows a clear gap in how audiences think about news on platforms versus news in general, with audiences in all four countries generally perceiving news on most platforms as less trustworthy compared to information in the news media overall. While there are some exceptions for some platforms - particularly in Brazil, where some gaps are smaller or even reversed - the consistency of the pattern across contexts is noteworthy.

For our main general measure of trust we took a similar approach to the one employed in the project's 2021 survey (Toff et al. 2021b), asking first to what extent respondents felt they could trust 'information in the news media' in their country on a five-point scale from 'do not trust at all' to 'trust completely'. Respondents who felt uncertain or torn could select 'neither trust nor do not trust' as a middle response category or, alternatively, could select 'don't know'. We asked similarly worded questions pertaining to news on platforms, eliciting different responses on the same five-point scale for each of seven distinct platforms that are widely used in the four countries that are our focus: Facebook, Google, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, WhatsApp, and YouTube.

In Appendix B we provide more detailed results for these questions, but in Figure 1.1 we show how levels of trust in news on platforms vary in relation to levels of trust in news overall. India in particular exhibits much higher levels of trust compared to the other countries, whereas Brazil ranks slightly behind the US and the UK. About a third of audiences in Brazil (as well as in the US) also said they did not think information in the news media in their country could be trusted in general. The Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2022 (Newman et al. 2022) previously found a decline in trust in news in Brazil. In recent years Brazil had exhibited above-average levels of trust compared to the other countries, but this trend may have stopped. Declining trust there may be due to a combination of fatigue from the COVID-19 pandemic in a country that was severely affected; a contentious political environment, including sustained criticism of journalists from President Jair Bolsonaro; and particularly acute increases in poverty in recent years, all of which may affect audience attitudes towards news.

With respect to trust in news on platforms, Google is among the most trusted across all four countries (57% in Brazil, 77% in India, 52% in the UK, and 53% in the US), while Facebook was among the least trusted in the UK (27%) and the US (29%). There is also a stark divide for trust in news on WhatsApp in Brazil (53%) and India (54%), where more than half of the population in those countries say they trust news there. Respondents in Brazil (46%) and India (51%) also report higher levels of trust for news on YouTube compared to people in the UK (29%) and the US (20%). Trust levels for information on Instagram are higher in Brazil (39%) when compared to the other three countries (27% in India, 24% in the UK, and 26% in the US), where Instagram is among the least trusted platforms, along with TikTok in the UK and the US (20% in both countries say they trust news on it).

By comparing levels of trust in news in general in each country with trust in news on platforms, the gaps in trust are highly noticeable for most, although not all, platforms. In general, people in all four countries tend to trust news in general at higher levels than they trust news on platforms. These differences are significant across most platforms in India, the UK, and the US, with the exception of news on Google in the UK and US, where levels of trust are similar or slightly higher. The trust gap is particularly pronounced when it comes to TikTok, which might be due to a combination of the platform being more focused on entertainment content and being less familiar to many respondents. Brazil is somewhat different compared to the other countries, with respondents tending to trust news on Google, WhatsApp, and YouTube at least as much as, if not more so than, news in general in their country. We suspect these country-level differences may reflect demographic and political differences among each country's populations, which we address in more detail below.

Who is least trusting of news on platforms?

While there are many factors underlying why trust gaps persist, we focus here on the three most important differences around those who trust news on platforms and those who do not. These differences relate to (a) whether people use platforms at all; (b) their age and level of educational attainment; and (c) political factors, not only in terms of political orientation but also the degree to which people are politically interested and engaged.
Disparities in trust are closely linked to who uses platforms and who uses them for news
First, and perhaps most important, we note that those who trust news on platforms are often quite similar in profile to those who trust information in the news media in general. Second, as we underscored in our report last year (Toff et al. 2021b), trust tends to be highest among those who access news most frequently. Third, the profile of people who use platforms tends to include people who use more news.

Combined, this means that gaps in trust between news in general and news on platforms tend to be explained largely by higher levels of distrust among people who do not use platforms. It is worth keeping in mind that there are significant portions of the public in all four countries, but especially India and Brazil, who still do not consume news online, much less do so on digital platforms. For example, when we asked people how often they accessed news online - including from social media platforms, messaging apps, and search engines - we found that about half of the samples in all four countries did so daily and just over six in ten in the UK, but as many as one-third of Indian respondents and one-fifth of Brazilians never got news online (see Figure 1.2).

Many people also do not use platforms at all and/or rarely get news from them when they do. As shown in Figure 1.3, while the vast majority of respondents say they have heard of each of the seven platforms we asked about, many do not use them (remember many of our respondents in Brazil and India have limited or no internet access). Even smaller percentages get news from platforms on a regular basis. Facebook, Google, and YouTube ranked as the most used in all countries, with WhatsApp being the most widely used platform in Brazil (84%) and India (56%).

These differences matter in helping to explain gaps in trust. Those who say they access news on platforms daily or more frequently also tend to exhibit higher levels of trust in news relative to those who do not use platforms at all, or those who do so but rarely or never get news from them (see Figure 1.4). Differences between platform users in general and platform users who get news from them are smaller in Brazil and India, again reflecting smaller differences among platform users in those countries, but both groups tend to be more trusting towards news overall. The differences are most clearly noticeable across all platforms in the UK and the US.

Differences by age and education

Parallel to these differences rooted in use of platforms and use of platforms for news, we also see systematic differences in trust related to two key demographic variables. As we showed in a previous report (Toff et al. 2021b), older and less educated people tend to be the least trusting towards news in general, and the same is true with respect to trust in news on most platforms (see Figure 1.5). There is, however, mixed evidence about the role of age for trust in news, especially from studies including other countries showing that younger audiences tend to be less trusting than older people (Kalogeropoulos et al. 2019; Hanitzsch et al. 2017).

The largest gaps are found when comparing trust in news on Google in India, YouTube in the US, and Instagram and TikTok in the UK, where differences when examining younger and older respondents reach nearly 40 percentage points. Age gaps are somewhat smaller in Brazil, and there is no difference by age for trust in news on WhatsApp, a platform that is widely used in the country.

Likewise, those who have college degrees are also more likely to trust news overall as well as on platforms, again with some variation by country and platform (see Figure 1.6). Among Americans there is a 22 percentage point gap in trust in news in general between those who are or are not college educated, which is considerably larger than in the other countries. When looking at trust in news on platforms only, there is a significant gap in the US and in the UK for Twitter, a platform with a reputation for a somewhat niche user base (Pew Research Center, 2019). There is basically no difference by education for those who trust news on WhatsApp and Facebook in Brazil but, as a general trend, those who are more educated also trust news on platforms more, similar to the patterns we observe when examining trust in news in general.

In Brazil and India the biggest gap between those who are and are not college educated is seen with respect to levels of trust in news on Google; however, news found through the search engine still enjoys moderate to high levels of trust even among those who are less educated. In India we also see large gaps for trust in news on WhatsApp and Facebook, in which a larger percentage of respondents with college degrees say they trust news on these platforms. In Brazil, on the other hand, those without a college degree are more likely to trust news on TikTok. These results for Brazil may be a reflection of some previously studied political dynamics there showing how higher levels of education in the country do not necessarily predict political behaviour (Schlegel 2021).

Differences related to politics

Lastly, one of the other major dividing lines when it comes to explaining who is least trusting of news on digital platforms pertains to politics. In some countries, these political divides are very much related to support for different political parties and major political figures, but more generally, as we emphasised in our last report, there are significant cleavages between those who are interested and engaged in politics versus those who are not, and that extends to trust in news on platforms as well.

A more consistent explanation for differences in trust in news on platforms comes from examining political interest. The same pattern holds across all four countries: people who are more interested in politics also have higher levels of trust in news on platforms (see Figure 1.7). To be sure, there is variation in how these dynamics play out. In Brazil we see virtually no difference when it comes to Facebook and TikTok but considerable differences in trust levels for news on Google, Instagram, and YouTube between those who are most and least politically interested. This might be due to differences in the kinds of content people associate with these platforms, with users and non-users alike in Brazil perhaps perceiving Facebook and TikTok as spaces containing less political news content altogether, making those platforms, therefore, less polarising by political interest.

WhatsApp in Brazil is the only platform where trust levels from less politically interested respondents is slightly higher, perhaps due to a combination of warnings about the credibility of information circulating there and the importance the platform has for political discussion in the country (Rossini et al. 2021), since a significant share of politically interested Brazilians still say they trust news on WhatsApp.

The importance of WhatsApp for political discussion might also be at issue in India (Badrinathan 2021; Chauchard and Garimella 2022), but the most politically interested Indian respondents have higher levels of trust in news on the messaging app. Differences related to political interest are also apparent for trust in news on YouTube, Google, and Facebook in India.

In the UK the largest gap in trust according to political interest is on YouTube. British respondents also have lower levels of trust in almost all platforms, which might be a consequence of a more limited use of platforms for news in the first place. The US also shows lower levels of trust in news on platforms, even among politically interested individuals, when compared to Brazil and India, with the largest gaps for trust on YouTube, followed by Twitter, WhatsApp, and TikTok.

One reason political interest may be particularly relevant to explaining disparities in trust in news relates to another finding from our most recent qualitative research on trust in news (Ross Arguedas et al. 2022). In that report, we noted that many of those who used platforms regularly and had low trust in the news they found there made important distinctions according to news topic. They often emphasised that news about politics was viewed with suspicion, whereas they often did not care as much about evaluating the trustworthiness of the sources of information they encountered on platforms when it came to non-political subjects, which accounted for most of the news they saw.

These results underscore the importance of politics in shaping how people think about trust in news and add to our other observations in this section showing how trust in news on platforms depends not only on people's use of platforms, but also on key demographic variables including age and education, as well as political attitudes, especially level of interest. In summary, what we have documented in this section are commonalities across the four countries that help to explain gaps in trust in information in the news media versus news found on platforms. In the next section we build on these results and show that despite often relatively high scepticism towards news on platforms, many hold fairly positive feelings towards platforms because they largely use them for reasons unrelated to news.

2. News is rarely central to people's experiences using platforms ↑

In this section we focus on people's broader feelings towards platforms and why they say they use them. Reasons vary to some degree from platform to platform, but they are often unrelated to news, which helps account for why, despite gaps in trust towards news on most platforms, audiences in all four countries have fairly positive feelings associated with platforms in general. This may be because people tend to use them for many other purposes in daily life, with news and information being largely a secondary concern, even if many also see the quality of the information on platforms as problematic, as we will show in the third section of this report.

Most express positive feelings towards most platforms

The trust gap we found holds consistently across most platforms and countries, yet we also find that, overwhelmingly, most people hold fairly positive feelings towards platforms in general - if they possess any feelings at all (see Figure 2.1). In addition to asking about trust in news on each platform, we asked a separate question designed to measure whether people felt 'positive or negative' about each of the platforms, irrespective of whether they themselves used them. We wanted to better understand how people think about platforms in general, not only how they think about news on these services. We found similar patterns across the four countries; all platforms received an overall net positive rating, with the exception of Twitter in the US and TikTok in India, the UK, and the US.

While the share of positive evaluations varies significantly from one platform to the next, Google is perceived most favourably in all countries, followed closely by YouTube. WhatsApp is the platform with the highest proportion of positive feelings in Brazil, and the majority of respondents in India and the UK also view it favourably. TikTok and Twitter generally received the lowest shares of positive evaluations in all countries, although in some cases percentages were low because of higher numbers who held no opinion or had never heard of the platforms.

Negative evaluations of Facebook were particularly apparent in the UK and the US when compared with Brazil and India. This might reflect discussions regarding platform regulation that may be more salient among audiences in Global North countries. As we discuss in the following sections, it is likely that positive evaluations of platforms are closely related to the specific reasons respondents use them and may have little to do with how people think about the quality of news they find there. If Google, WhatsApp, or YouTube give people what they want when it comes to why they primarily use them - connecting with friends and family or offering diversionary entertainment - it may not matter to most people whether the news they find there is perceived as untrustworthy (even though it can be highly problematic from a wider, societal, point of view).

Less positive evaluations of platforms are found mainly among people who do not use them

Similar to the results we showed in the first section, usage of platforms is closely linked to how positively people evaluate them. This, too, may be another indication of how people may evaluate platforms based on criteria specific to how they use them. Respondents who used each platform during the previous 30 days were far more likely to hold positive evaluations of them compared to those who did not (see Figure 2.2). These differences were highly pronounced for many platforms. The biggest gap between users and non-users is for WhatsApp in the US, where 81% of users and 13% of non-users said they had positive feelings about the platform. Only about one-fifth of Americans used the platform for any reason during the previous 30 days, but in India, where the messaging app is much more widely used, a significant gap between users and non-users was also found: 84% of users and 36% of non-users expressed positive feelings about WhatsApp. These differences are also pronounced in most platforms in the other countries. In Brazil, 86% of Google users and 38% of non-users have positive perceptions of the platform. In the UK, the biggest gap in positive evaluations by usage was observed for TikTok, where 70% of users and 14% of non-users said they had positive opinions about it.

Among those who get news from platforms at least once a day or more frequently, we also found slightly higher levels of positive feelings towards platforms compared to users overall. These differences are largely explained by higher rates of positive feelings towards platforms among those who use these services more frequently for any purpose - not necessarily because of anything related to the news. In fact, there is basically no difference in levels of positive feelings among daily users of platforms for any purpose and those who use them for news daily. This holds true for most platforms across all countries, with a few exceptions, including Facebook in the UK and the US, where a larger percentage of those who use the platform at least daily for news hold positive feelings towards it (70% in the UK and 76% in the US) compared to even those who use the platform at least daily for any purpose (57% in the UK and 61% in the US).

As we look more deeply at the data in this section, one reason that trust in news on platforms may be low relative to the positive feelings many said they associated with platforms is that ideas about platforms encompass a host of other factors often unrelated to news and information.

Examining reasons why people say they use different platforms

What explains positive feelings towards most platforms but relatively low trust in news on them? A significant factor is that most people use most platforms for other purposes often unrelated to news. These findings echo prior academic studies that similarly show news constituting a small proportion of what most people see or do on digital platforms (Malik and Pfeffer 2016; Miller et al. 2016). Google is perhaps something of an exception, where comparatively higher numbers do say they use it in order to get up-to-date information about what is happening in the world, but as we showed previously, trust gaps are also smallest for that platform, an indication that how people think about news on platforms may depend on what they associate with doing while using these services.

The results we report in this section involve responses to a set of questions we asked about why people say they use digital platforms. These results are crucial to explaining why people hold mainly positive feelings about platforms even when levels of trust in them are relatively low. As will be clear throughout this section, the reasons respondents give for using platforms are often not related to news but might be very relevant for completing tasks in their daily lives or for maintaining personal relationships. Concerns about the quality of news and information on platforms - which, as we show in Section 3, are held by many - may well be less important when it comes to explaining most people's overall attitudes towards platforms.

In constructing our survey questionnaire we included a number of questions that capture the reasons we heard mentioned most frequently during qualitative interviews with platform users (Ross Arguedas et al. 2022). The structure of these questions allowed respondents to select all that they felt applied to them; the reasons were not mutually exclusive from one another. We focus in this section on four of the most-used platforms: WhatsApp, Facebook, YouTube, and Google, and we organise this section reason by reason rather than platform by platform in order to capture some of the commonalities and differences between platforms (and across countries) rather than discussing each separately.

We note, however, an important caveat to the findings we report on in this section. Unlike the rest of this report, here we draw on a separate sample of respondents from an additional data collection we conducted in July 2022. When we asked about reasons for using platforms in our original survey, two of the four platforms were inadvertently omitted from the questionnaire due to a technical error. Given that recontacting respondents interviewed face to face in various locations around Brazil and India was not feasible, we decided to field a separate survey to collect responses for these items for all four platforms. This separate survey differed from our main survey results in several important ways: most significant among them is that it is based on an online survey of audiences in all four countries, meaning these results cannot be said to be representative of the entire populations and are not directly comparable to our other results, especially in Brazil and India. The survey samples we are describing in this section are composed of younger, more educated, and more urban respondents. In the case of India, only English speakers were invited to participate in this follow-up survey, whereas our face-to-face survey was fielded in 11 different languages. Still, despite these limitations we believe that platform-by-platform comparisons are revealing and helpful for providing context for understanding other results in this report.
Reason 1: Connecting with people
One of the leading reasons that respondents in all four countries said they used platforms for was as a tool to 'connect with people' (see Figure 2.3). However, this reason was applicable mainly with respect to two platforms in particular: WhatsApp and Facebook. A relatively larger proportion of Indian respondents also said they use YouTube to foster connections with others, but this was more unusual elsewhere. (We did not include this reason when we asked about reasons for using Google.) That connecting with people was one of the most frequently cited reasons for using Facebook may reflect that platform's emphasis on this in recent years (Mosseri 2018).

The degree to which WhatsApp in particular is largely perceived as a communication tool rather than as a conduit for information about news and current affairs - even as many say they get news frequently there - is reflected in data from our main survey where we asked respondents who used WhatsApp about the types of groups that they generally were engaging with. Although people might see news in groups or conversations where this is not the primary focus, our previous qualitative research (Ross Arguedas et al. 2022) shows limited exposure to news on WhatsApp when people navigate among their most frequently used groups and conversations. The messaging app is used less widely in the US and to a lesser extent the UK, but among those who do use it, large numbers of users report mainly participating in groups with social connections, such as family, friends, and workmates. This is also the case in India and Brazil, where the platform is broadly used.

Political groups ranked quite low on the list of types of groups WhatsApp users said they had used in the past 30 days. A minority in all countries said they used a political group, most of them in India and the US. Despite the attention that political groups receive in Brazil (Chagas 2022; Machado et al. 2019), only a small share of WhatsApp users report participating in such groups on the platform (see Figure 2.4).
Reason 2: Entertainment or passing time
We also see similarities across countries around platforms people most associate with using for 'entertainment or to pass the time'. YouTube ranked most highly as the platform most said they used for this purpose (see Figure 2.5). Of course, there are likely to be many differences in the kinds of entertainment people are engaging with on these platforms. Some political communication studies have investigated to what extent the video platform is also used for political purposes (Munger and Phillips 2022; Ribeiro et al. 2020), but we suspect for many, given levels of political interest in general, the forms of entertainment or leisure they are referring to when responding to this question are largely non-political or unrelated to current affairs.

Facebook ranked second to YouTube as the platform associated with entertainment or passing time as a reason for using it. A significant share of users in all countries also said they used the social network for this purpose. Smaller segments of respondents said they used Google or WhatsApp for this purpose in all countries, although the majority selected it as a reason in both Brazil and India.
Reasons 3 and 4: Getting information and exposure to different perspectives
When it comes to news-related reasons for using platforms, Google is the one service most people across all four countries consistently said they used for such purposes, although YouTube was also frequently associated with certain forms of information-seeking.

Nearly eight in ten in Brazil and India said they used Google to 'get up-to-date information about what is happening in the world' and a clear majority also did so in the UK and the US (see Figure 2.6). However, the percentages who felt this reason applied to other platforms were much lower, especially relative to how many said they used Facebook or WhatsApp to connect with others. Getting news on these platforms may often seem like a secondary purpose - maybe even an intrusion, even as broadly defined as we have referred to news in our questions (rather than more narrowly as, say, exclusively straight factual reporting). In the UK and the US, fewer than half of respondents said they used YouTube or Facebook when looking for information. In Brazil, the numbers for each were closer to 50%. Only in India did a majority cite 'get up-to-date information about what is happening in the world' for all four platforms. Although in this case WhatsApp was the lowest ranked of the four, this might point to a difference between intentional and incidental exposure to news on the platform. For example, 58% of Brazilians that responded to our main survey said they got news on WhatsApp at least once a day, but the share in our online survey that said they considered it one of the reasons they use the platform is much smaller.

Although broader than news, we also included an additional reason respondents could select -pertaining to getting 'perspectives unavailable elsewhere' - that we formulated based on our interviews with platform users (see Figure 2.7). Here we see evidence of YouTube being valued alongside Google for this purpose, although, in general, smaller percentages cited this reason across the board, particularly on Facebook and WhatsApp.
Additional reasons: Learning new things, commercial purposes, or work and school
Finally, we included several additional reasons unrelated to news that also often generated somewhat higher percentages of agreement. These included learning how to do new things (which was mainly associated with Google and YouTube) as well as using platforms for commercial purposes or for work or school. These latter reasons, which majorities often cited with respect to certain platforms, may be important to explaining why so many hold such positive feelings towards platforms (see Figure 2.8). A perception that platforms are useful for daily tasks - in other words, to help them live their lives - may be a critical reason why many are willing to overlook things they simultaneously view as big problems on platforms.

Similarly, considerable portions of the public said they turned to certain platforms for commercial purposes. The majority in both Brazil and India said they used YouTube when deciding between products to buy, and it was the same for Google in India. In Brazil and India, between one-third and just under a half said they used WhatsApp and Facebook to sell or buy things (see Figure 2.9). Although less often cited as a reason, using platforms for work or school was selected comparatively more often for Google than other platforms, but less so overall in the UK compared to the other countries (see Figure 2.10).

Although unrelated to news, these widely cited reasons for using platforms provide helpful context to understanding how platforms may be used differently in different places, which may also contribute to varying ways in which they are evaluated in each country.

In summary, while news on platforms may be increasingly important for many news organisations, it is less clear that it ranks highly as a reason why most people use platforms in the first place. Understanding such preferences is likely to help explain how many may be less trusting of news on these services, even as they have generally positive feelings towards the platforms in general. As long as people are generally satisfied with platforms for serving the specific reasons they have for using them, news may rarely enter into the equation at all. However, a large share of the public in all four countries also believes the quality of the information on platforms is, in fact, a problem in itself.

3. Perceived problems with platforms ↑

Despite the positive feelings towards platforms we described in the previous section, many respondents in our surveys still expressed considerable concern about major controversies that have been in the news about them. In this section, we report results pertaining to a set of questions we asked about the same four platforms we focussed on in the previous section. These questions were designed to capture how widespread perceptions about problems on platforms may or may not be among the broader public in these four countries. The specific problems we asked about are those we heard most frequently expressed in both our previous qualitative interviews, as well as from journalists and publishers in roundtable discussions held in December 2021. These problems included concerns about misinformation circulating on platforms, harassment, and privacy and safety issues. We show how many in the UK and the US are particularly concerned about problems with Facebook more than other platforms, while even larger percentages in Brazil saw problems on all four platforms. Platform users in India, on the other hand, were less likely to say they recognised any of these issues as 'big problems'.

Our findings in this section show how audiences express a variety of concerns about different kinds of problems on platforms. In the second part of this section, we also devote some attention to one concern in particular: whether platforms are perceived as contentious spaces for discussion about political matters. We do find some evidence in this regard, but smaller proportions of the public tend to do so, and they tend to be particularly concentrated among the most politically interested individuals.
Many 'big problems' on platforms despite positive feelings towards them
A significant share of respondents in India, the UK, and the US, and the majority in Brazil, indicated that they agreed that several high-profile issues that platforms have publicly grappled with were, in fact, 'big problems' (see Figure 3.1). This was especially true for Facebook in Brazil, the UK, and the US, but relatively fewer recognised them as such in India. Only in Brazil were similar levels registered when it came to Google, WhatsApp, or YouTube.

To be clear, in all the results we report in this section, we focus on responses from all who had heard of each platform, regardless of whether they used them. As we note previously, many who do not use platforms may still have opinions about them. We seek to capture the broader public's views accordingly. At the end of this section, however, we consider how use of platforms relates to perceptions about what problems may or may not exist on them.
Problem 1: False or misleading information
Overall, the issue that elicited the largest percentages viewing it as a 'very big' or 'moderately big problem' was that pertaining to misinformation. More than three-quarters of respondents in Brazil said they believed that issue was a big problem on both Facebook and WhatsApp, and nearly as many said the same for Google and YouTube.

Misinformation on WhatsApp generated much lower levels of concern in the other three countries, which likely reflects the comparatively higher levels of scrutiny that platform has received in Brazil, owing to reports of misleading content circulating in WhatsApp groups there (Mont'Alverne et al. 2019; Resende et al. 2018). It is also plausible that Brazilians have simply encountered more problems with misinformation while using WhatsApp. That said, misinformation on WhatsApp has also garnered considerable attention in the news media in India, especially due to some high-profile incidents of violence tied to misleading WhatsApp messages in recent years (McLaughlin 2018), but no similar levels of concern about that platform were registered there.

In the UK and the US, concerns about misinformation are highest for Facebook, but 40% of people also see false and misleading information as a big problem on Google and YouTube. That 63% in the UK and the US said they think misinformation is a big problem on Facebook may reflect the salience of that platform in debates concerning the subject, as well as recent political events that have involved the platform. Scholarly work has also focused heavily on what role the platform may have played as a vector for misinformation during the last US presidential campaigns (Guess et al. 2018; Sanderson et al. 2021) as well as during Brexit (Del Vicario 2017).
Problem 2: Harassment
In the UK and the US, more than half of respondents saw harassment as a big problem on Facebook. In recent years, young women who are journalists have raised concerns about being the targets of harassment on these platforms (Lewis et al. 2020), and our findings show the problem is also perceived to be quite widespread among the public in the US. Data from a 2020 survey from the Pew Research Center (2021) also show that 41% of Americans say they have personally experienced online harassment, and three-quarters of these said it happened on social media.

Finally, we note that levels of concerns with harassment vary to some degree by gender but often such differences are modest. On Facebook, where we see some of the largest differences by gender, 81% of women in Brazil say harassment is a big problem there compared to 73% of men. In the UK, 61% of women and 56% of men say the same. In India and the US there are no significant gender differences in evaluating harassment as a big problem on Facebook.
Problem 3: Using data about people irresponsibly
Concerns about how platforms use people's data also registered as a big problem, following a similar pattern. Facebook was again most associated with this problem in all four countries. In the UK and the US, more than half of respondents said they saw data management issues as a big problem, and three-quarters of Brazilians also said so. Debates about how the company uses people's data to deliver ads and algorithms to personalise what it shows people, and several public scandals around who has access to this information, have been the subject of considerable public discussion in recent years. It appears such issues have resonated with the majority of the public in these countries. In Brazil and India, a significant share of respondents also saw misuse of data as a concern on WhatsApp, while in the UK and the US almost half of respondents see it as a problem with respect to Google too.
Problems 4 and 5: Prioritising certain political views and censoring content
We included two additional problems in our survey reflecting concerns over platforms' decision-making when it comes to political content or other kinds of sensitive information. Specifically, we asked about whether platforms prioritising certain political views was a big problem on Facebook, Google, or YouTube, and separately whether censoring content was a big problem on any of the four platforms.

Respondents in the US were somewhat more likely to see such issues as big problems on Facebook - concerns that are also shared to some extent by British respondents. Facebook has recently been at the centre of debates about the removal of misinformation concerning COVID-19. The platform also took steps to bar political figures, including former President Donald Trump, in response to events at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. However, we note that even as relatively large percentages said they thought such issues were big problems, elsewhere in this report we have also shown that relatively few said they look to platforms as a source for exposure to different perspectives as one of the reasons they used them. In other words, it is not altogether clear how salient these issues may be to people's own personal use of platforms.

In Brazil, concerns with platforms prioritising political views or censoring content were still shared by more than half of respondents, but that represents a somewhat smaller proportion of the public there when compared to the other issues we asked about. In India, the percentage who saw these issues as big problems were no different than for the other issues.
Understanding differences in perceptions of problems across countries
We sought to examine what might explain some of the different dynamics we observed across these four countries by considering what subgroups within each country were more or less likely to identify these issues as big problems on each platform. Across all platforms, users in India and Brazil are more likely to say each of the subjects we asked about are, in fact, big problems; 62% of Facebook users in India, for example, say false or misleading information is a big problem on the platform, compared to just 49% of those who said the same among the public at large (excluding those who had never heard of Facebook). In Brazil, 86% of Facebook users said they agreed false or misleading information was a big problem on the platform, compared to 76% of the general sample.

In contrast, in the UK and the US there were fewer differences between users and non-users of platforms when it came to perceptions about problems on platforms. The proportion of Facebook users that say false or misleading information is a problem on the platform (63%) is virtually the same as those who say it is in the overall sample. In other words, non-users of platforms in the US and the UK are equally likely to perceive that platforms have these various problems, whereas in Brazil and India, concern about these issues is driven mainly by those who use these services.

Political preferences also affect how people think about these problems, but only for specific problems and platforms. For example, 70% of Indian respondents who view Modi favourably, and 39% of British interviewees who view Johnson favourably, say they believe false or misleading information is a big problem on WhatsApp, but, in comparison, rates are significantly lower for those who view the Indian (58%) or UK (24%) prime ministers unfavourably.

In Brazil no differences were observed with respect to evaluations of problems on WhatsApp and Google according to political preferences. For other problems, however, political divides were more apparent. Among those with favourable views towards Bolsonaro, 74% said they thought YouTube censoring content was a big problem, compared to 60% of those who did not have favourable views towards the Brazilian president. In addition, 76% of Bolsonaro supporters said they thought censorship was a big problem on Facebook, compared to 65% among those who do not support him. These political differences may be impacted by some recent politically salient controversies, including Facebook's removal of pages by Bolsonaro supporters accused of coordinated inauthentic behaviour on the platform and YouTube's decision to delete videos due to concerns over misinformation about COVID-19 and election processes in Brazil.

In the US and the UK we see a similar political divisiveness in perceptions around some problems on platforms. Among those with an unfavourable view of Joe Biden, 64% say Facebook censoring content is a big problem on that platform, compared to just 44% of Biden supporters.

In the UK, 71% of those with unfavourable views about Johnson say the same compared to 54% of those who support the UK's then prime minister.

Platforms as sites for politically contentiousness and divisive debate

In addition to the problems we asked about in the previous section, we asked two questions designed to assess to what degree audiences perceive platforms as contentious spaces for debate over political matters. Both are drawn from previous research on this subject, including an academic study about contentious political discussion in Wisconsin in the US in the months following a particularly fractious political event (Wells et al. 2017) and a study by the Pew Research Center (2016) that examined perceptions around political debate on platforms in particular.

We asked respondents whether they felt 'comfortable talking about politics with friends and acquaintances' or felt they needed to 'be careful with what you say'. We also asked respondents whether there is anyone they stopped talking with due to disagreements over political matters during the previous 12 months. Both questions were asked in general to all respondents in all four countries, but we also separately asked users of WhatsApp and Facebook to say whether they felt they had to be careful with what they said on each of those platforms specifically and whether they had stopped talking with someone due to disagreements over statements made about politics on those platforms specifically.

Although in general we find evidence that platforms are seen, at least to some extent, as sites for contentiousness around political conversation and debate, it is important to keep in mind the degree to which such concerns are largely concentrated among those who are most interested in talking about politics. Most people in most places do not say they talk much about politics in their day-to-day lives. Their experiences on platforms are largely extensions of these experiences offline. We asked a separate question of all respondents about how often they talked about politics with others in their lives. Nearly a third of respondents in Brazil (31%) and more than a quarter in India (27%) said they 'never' did so, far higher than the 10% and 11% in the UK and the US, respectively, who said the same.

These baseline differences across countries notwithstanding, significant proportions of the public in India (51%) and Brazil (64%) also said they felt they needed to be careful when talking about politics in general, indicating how contentious the environments in these countries may be currently when it comes to any discussion of political matters (see Figure 3.2). In India's case this might also reflect the growing application of censorship laws that the government has implemented, which may impact people's willingness to talk freely about their political opinions. Rates were also nearly as high in the US, perhaps owing to episodes of political violence seen there in recent years. There have also been recent cases of physical violence related to politics in Brazil and India, which might help to explain why large numbers of people do not feel comfortable discussing the topic in these countries either.

Relatively smaller percentages said they had stopped talking to someone due to disagreements about politics in the previous year, although 15% of those in the UK and Brazil said this had been their experience and almost one-fifth (18%) of Americans said the same.
Comparing political contentiousness on platforms to experiences in general
When it comes to platforms, higher proportions of respondents say they need to be careful with what they say there compared to the percentages who say the same in general. Larger differences were observed among Facebook users than among WhatsApp users (see Figure 3.3). Respondents from the UK and the US who use Facebook are more likely to say they need to be careful with what they say on the platform, while Indian respondents who use WhatsApp are more likely to say the same. There is virtually no difference for Brazilian respondents on both platforms.

People are, however, somewhat less likely to say they stopped talking to someone due to disagreements about politics on platforms. There were minimal differences when it came to Facebook and among WhatsApp users. Where differences were observed in Brazil, the UK, and the US, people were somewhat less likely to say they had experienced such disagreements on the messaging app itself (see Figure 3.4).

Such experiences, however, are not evenly distributed among the public at large. Those who experience such disagreements are largely concentrated among respondents who are more interested in politics and thus more likely to encounter political discussion and debate in these settings. When we examine the subset of the public that is more politically interested, we find much higher levels report experiencing such disagreements on the platform (see Figure 3.5). This holds true across all countries and platforms, which helps to explain why, even when people see platforms as potential places for divisive and uncomfortable political interactions, it does not necessarily harm many people's positive evaluations of these services, since only the subset of people most interested in politics are likely to be encountering such contentiousness.

These results serve as a helpful corrective for both researchers and journalists, who may sometimes assume their own experiences on platforms map onto those of other people. But those who study platforms and use them to disseminate news are likely to encounter far more political divisiveness in these spaces than more typical users. That does not negate the problems such users may face when using these services, but it helps to explain perhaps some of the disconnect that may exist at times between the public's attitudes towards platforms and the concerns of policymakers and other engaged critics.

4. How ideas about journalism relate to use of platforms ↑

As people increasingly encounter news on platforms while doing other things, such experiences with news may play a growing role in shaping how people think about news. Platforms such as social media, messaging apps, and search engines are not only sites where news itself circulates but they may also be important places where people encounter discussion about and criticism of journalism itself. In this section, we explore people's ideas about news and the journalists who produce it, how these ideas relate to the public's use of platforms, and how people make sense of what is or is not trustworthy online.

We find that many people hold quite negative perceptions about journalism and journalists. These perceptions are often - but not in all countries - concentrated among those who exhibit lower trust in news. We also find that sizeable minorities in all four countries say they encounter criticism of the news media frequently, and that those with lower trust in news are more likely to say they see or hear such criticism often. When we asked people where they saw such criticism and from whom, many pointed to both social media and politicians as being key sources for exposure to criticism about the news, along with ordinary people and everyday conversations. Many also said they paid close attention to social indicators provided by platforms - what others say about posts in comments and how many likes or shares messages received. In other words, one way platforms may facilitate the spread of critiques about news and journalism is through making such signals much more visible to people.

Taken together, the findings in this section underscore the importance of social relationships in shaping the discourses about news that people are exposed to and the ideas they embrace about the news. The impact of platforms on trust in news cannot be fully separated from the networks of people that audiences engage with on platforms themselves.

Perceptions of journalism and journalists tend towards the unfavourable

When we asked respondents in all four countries to state their agreement or disagreement with several statements we often heard expressed in our previous qualitative interviews with audiences, we found on balance many held fairly negative perceptions of journalists (see Figure 4.1). However, in Brazil and India audiences often held a mix of otherwise contrasting views, both positive and negative.

Close to a half of respondents in all four countries agreed that journalists try to manipulate the public to serve the agendas of powerful politicians or care more about getting attention than reporting the facts. Negative views were highest among respondents in India, where 53% also agreed that journalists are only 'in it for the money', echoing perhaps ongoing concerns in the country about paid news and professionalism within the industry. Meanwhile, positive perceptions were lowest in the UK and the US, where under 40% of respondents agreed that journalists independently verify information they report or try to keep their opinions from slanting the news.

When looking at the relationship between perceptions of journalists and trust in news, we find that individuals who are trusting of news are more likely to hold positive perceptions of journalists, but not necessarily overwhelmingly so. For example, in India and the US, of those who trust news in general, 59% and 54% respectively agreed overall that journalists try to keep their opinions from slanting the news, compared to 36% and 18% respectively among those who do not trust news in general. When it comes to negative perceptions, we find the inverse pattern in the UK and the US, where higher percentages of individuals who lack trust in news overall held negative perceptions, compared to their more trusting counterparts.

The relationship between negative perceptions and trust is more mixed in Brazil and India, where more trusting individuals were not only more likely to hold positive perceptions of journalists but negative ones too. Such results may seem surprising, but we suspect they reflect the disconnect between trust in information in the news media and what people think about journalistic practices. The latter may not be something that most have put much thought into, particularly those who are more disengaged from news altogether. Moreover, these results might also indicate that trust in the information in the news media is not only or even primarily anchored around ideas people have about journalistic practices and procedures, but instead based on other factors involving how people feel about the value of news to their lives altogether.

How platforms play a role in helping to circulate criticism about news

These findings relate to a second set of questions we asked pertaining more directly to exposure to criticism about news and journalism. We asked a series of questions about how often respondents 'heard people criticising journalists or the news media'. For those who said they at least sometimes heard such criticism, we also asked from whom they heard such critiques and where, including several possible online and offline sources.

Scholars who study journalism have taken a growing interest in how public perceptions of the profession, both positive and negative, may be shaped by a range of factors, including not only people's own past experiences with news but also how they hear journalism spoken about around them (Carlson 2017).

We found that sizeable minorities in each country said they often saw or heard others criticising the news media (see Figure 4.2). As many as 40% of respondents in the US, 33% in the UK, 28% in Brazil, and 18% in India said they 'very often' or 'somewhat often' saw or heard such criticism. Including those who only occasionally see or hear such criticism, more than half of respondents in Brazil (61%) and India (52%) and close to three-quarters of respondents in the UK and US said they had such encounters at least some of the time.

Furthermore, in all four countries, those who say they see criticism about journalism tend to be less trusting of news in general overall (see Figure 4.3). For example, in the UK, 48% of those who say they see criticism of news 'very often' or 'somewhat often' also say they themselves do not trust information in the news media in their country. This compares to only 29% for those who do trust news. Similarly, in India 30% of people who see criticism often say they do not trust news compared to just 16% who say they do. These numbers show there may be a relationship between trust levels and exposure to negative discourse about the news media, although we cannot assess the direction of causality to explain why with cross-sectional data.

Where do people encounter criticism of news?

Journalists and publishers have often voiced concerns about platforms contributing to the proliferation of criticism about journalism and outright attacks on the press, especially from those acting in bad faith (Toff et al. 2021a). We find some evidence supporting such a view. In all four countries, users of platforms also report more frequently seeing criticism 'very often' or 'somewhat often' compared to non-users of those platforms (see Figure 4.4). The gap between users and non-users is largest when it comes to Twitter, where the difference between both groups ranges from 21 percentage points (India) to 14 percentage points (the US).

A higher percentage of non-users of platforms also say they rarely see criticism of news media, which reinforces the connection between using platforms and exposure to criticism about news. Differences are more pronounced in Brazil, where 44% of people who do not use Google say they rarely see criticism compared to 27% of Google users. In India, 34% of those who do not use Twitter say they rarely encounter criticism, against 24% of users. Differences are smaller, but still present, in the UK and the US. Twenty-one per cent of British people who do not use Twitter say they rarely see criticism, while 12% of users say the same. In the US, 23% of those who do not use Instagram report rarely seeing criticism, compared to 14% of users.

When we asked people who encounter criticism about where they saw or heard criticism of news media, 'social media' was cited as one of the main places where they have encountered such criticism: 41% in Brazil, 25% in India, 38% in the UK, and 48% in the US (see Figure 4.5). These results lend some further support to the concerns raised by journalists with whom we spoke last year (Toff et al. 2021a), which has also been documented by recent research (Literat et al. 2022), suggesting that digital platforms may help stoke criticism about news and journalism.

To be clear, social media was hardly the only place where respondents said they encountered criticism about news. Many also said they heard or saw criticism of the news media in conversations with other people. This ranked a close second in three of the four countries as another key context where such criticism emerges. In India, talking with others was the main way people said they encountered criticism of the news, with half of respondents selecting it. Furthermore, news media - both print newspapers and news sites online - also stand out as relevant avenues for encountering criticism, especially in Brazil, where roughly one-third of respondents said they had seen criticism in both.

From whom do people encounter criticism of news?

When examining who this criticism tends to come from, we find that political figures stand out as key contributors to negative discourse about news among those who say they see criticism (see Figure 4.6). For example, in both Brazil and the US, close to half of respondents say they have heard criticism about the news media from politicians during the previous 12 months. In Brazil, where President Jair Bolsonaro has maintained a publicly turbulent relationship with mainstream news organisations, another 46% pointed to the government as a source of criticism. Political parties are also a relevant source in some places.

However, political figures were hardly the only sources of criticism that respondents named. Ordinary people were also mentioned by over half of respondents in India and the US, and more than 40% of respondents in Brazil and in the UK. In fact, in the UK and especially India, ordinary people are mentioned more frequently than any of the political figures and institutions as sources of news criticism. Friends are also mentioned by over one-third of respondents in each country, with the highest percentage in the US, where 44% identified them as a source. In Brazil, the UK, and the US, at least one in three people also said they have heard criticism of the news media from celebrities.

These results point to the varied sources of exposure to criticism about news and journalism that many encounter in their day-to-day lives. Some of it does appear to be shaped by encounters online while using platforms, but in many ways such encounters may be extensions of discourses occurring offline as well. We cannot assess the nature of the criticism of journalists or the news media that respondents are referring to here; in some cases, media in these countries may well have been involved in misconduct, controversial events, or misleading treatment of specific groups (Ashraf 2014; Elmasry et al. 2013; Marques et al. 2019; Mendes 2011), which may well elicit legitimate critiques. Undue criticism or bad-faith critiques fuelled largely by political, partisan, or other grievances, however, can become a larger concern from a democratic perspective, where criticism may undermine the influence of the press as an independent institution. These findings do not speak to the nature of these criticisms, only the degree to which people see criticism online versus offline and from what sources.

How social interactions on platforms influence how people decide what to trust

The results in the previous section underline the importance of social interactions with ordinary people and friends as a source for exposure to criticism of the news media. These results point to the relevance of such dynamics in shaping the ideas people hold around how news works and the quality of the information environment in their country. A separate set of findings, concerning what people pay most attention to when evaluating whether information may or may not be trustworthy online, illustrates a similar point. When people do encounter news on platforms they often pay a great deal of attention to what other people think about the information, including the number of people who have liked or shared a post or what people say about it in comments. Almost as many say such factors are important to pay attention to as say the same for whether or not they have heard of the media outlet behind it.

These findings come from a set of questions we asked, based on a list of commonly cited factors from our previous interviews from our last report, that focused on shortcuts and cues people use to make decisions about what to trust online. While approximately two-thirds of audiences in the UK and the US, and slightly less than that in Brazil and India, say it is important to them to pay attention to the media outlet itself, information provided by platforms about what other people think about the information ranked almost as highly, especially in Brazil and India (see Figure 4.7). More than half of respondents in the two Global South countries say they pay attention to what people say in the comments or how many likes and shares the information has.

What should be done to better differentiate between trustworthy and untrustworthy news on platforms?

Given people's varied experiences and encounters with criticism of news media in their countries - both on and off platforms - we sought to better understand how people thought about the question of who is most responsible for improving the quality of information on platforms. In recent years there have been considerable public discussions in all four countries around what additional actions platforms might take to counter misinformation and help individuals make more informed choices around the information they are exposed to while using these services. Some of these discussions have been prompted by pressure from governmental institutions. In other cases, platforms have adopted strategies on their own to respond to concerns, such as removing false and misleading posts about COVID-19, banning political figures like Donald Trump, or delaying the launch of new features with the potential to impact forthcoming elections, such as WhatsApp's decision around its new 'Communities' tool. However, even as debates have intensified around what actions platform companies or governments might take, we know much less about what the public thinks about these issues. What studies have been conducted have generally focused exclusively on the US.

The questions we included in our survey were patterned on similar items from a recent Knight Foundation (2022) survey focused on platform governance in the American context. In our questionnaire we asked respondents to what extent they agreed or disagreed with several statements about different actors involved in these debates: (a) whether platform companies ought to do more to distinguish between trustworthy and untrustworthy information on the internet; (b) whether the government should do more; (c) whether news media organisations should do more; and (d) whether it is 'primarily the responsibility of individuals to decide for themselves what news they consider trustworthy versus news that they consider to be untrustworthy on the internet' (see Figure 4.8). We presented all four items to respondents and asked people to indicate their agreement or disagreement with each statement; we did not force people to choose between them. We did so to reflect the fact that each of these statements is not mutually exclusive from the others, and it is perfectly rational for a respondent to agree with all or none of the statements. Our aim, however, was to assess to what degree audiences in all four countries made distinctions between these actors or had formed views on the subject at all.

We found limited variation in the public's views on who should do more, especially in Brazil and India. We suspect this may be a consequence of how comparatively limited such debates have been in these countries, which makes it harder for people to distinguish between different actors. In the UK and the US we found somewhat more variation, but a majority agreed with all four statements there, too. The largest differences were found in the US, where the percentage of people who said they agreed the government should do more was 10-15 percentage points lower than the percentage agreeing with the other statements. In the UK also, significantly fewer respondents said they agreed with the final statement about it being primarily an 'individual responsibility' to distinguish between what is or is not trustworthy on the internet.

Different perspectives within countries around who is most responsible

However, in an echo of the differences we observed with respect to trust in news on platforms, we found considerable differences on these items with regard to respondents' political preferences. In other words, debates around what ought to be done to improve the quality of the information on platforms has become politically polarised to some extent, at least in some countries. In the US, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to agree that tech companies (76% versus 61%, respectively), the news media (80% versus 64%), and the government (64% versus 47%) should do more to differentiate between trustworthy and untrustworthy news online. The pattern is reversed when it comes to individual responsibility, where 75% of Republicans agreed with the statement compared to 66% of Democrats. There are also stark differences in India. Those who held more favourable views towards Modi were much more likely to agree with all four statements: 83% of Modi supporters think the government and news organisations should do more; 82% think tech companies should do more; and 81% think it is a matter of individual responsibility. Among those who do not support the prime minister, agreement was much lower: only 53% said they thought the government or news

media organisations should do more. Another 60% said the same for the platform companies, but just 51% said they agreed it was ultimately an individual responsibility to distinguish between what is and is not a trustworthy source of information on the internet.

Differences were much less pronounced in the UK and Brazil: the biggest difference is around individual responsibility, with 62% of Conservatives agreeing with it and 56% of Labour supporters. In Brazil there were fewer significant differences found along lines of support or opposition to Bolsonaro.

Conclusion ↑

This report focuses on how people think about and use digital platforms for news in four countries and how these perceptions and behaviours relate to trust in news more generally. Our results point to the existence of a stark and consistent 'trust gap' - a disparity between levels of trust in news found on social media, messaging apps, and search engines, versus trust towards information in the news media more generally. Across Brazil, India, the UK, and the US, we find that audiences are generally less trusting of news on most digital platforms than they are of news in general and consider several possible factors that explain these differences.

First, while there is widespread concern that the growing use of platforms to access information has contributed to declining trust in journalism in many places around the world, our findings indicate a more nuanced possibility. Most intriguingly, we do not find lower trust in news among those who use platforms most frequently and access news there, but rather lower trust among those who access news elsewhere or consume less news overall.

Does this mean platforms play no role in declining rates of trust towards news overall among the public? No. It certainly remains possible that broader changes across the news industry, many of which are related to the growing use of platforms, may impact the public's perceptions about the trustworthiness of information in the news they encounter both online and offline. However, many of those who are least trusting towards news on platforms are of a similar profile to those who lack trust in news more generally. They are older, less educated, and less interested in politics, a subject that elicits heightened scepticism when it comes to whether news is perceived as trustworthy or not. In short, much like trust in news generally, those who are distrusting towards news on platforms are often those most disconnected from using either platforms or news. Some likely do so because they do not trust these services as tools for staying informed, but as our previous research has indicated, others lack trust because they largely fail to see the relevance of news to their lives (Ross Arguedas et al. 2022; Toff et al. 2021b) and/or view platforms sceptically as holding little value to them personally.

Second, echoing previous research (Andı 2021), many of the most common reasons people say they use platforms have little to do with news. Instead, the leading reasons many said they used platforms involved connecting with other people or for entertainment purposes. Fewer see platforms as places to find information about current affairs or gain access to different perspectives on such matters. While there is variation across platforms - Google and YouTube tend to be seen as more useful in this regard than Facebook or WhatsApp - low trust in news found on these services may partly reflect the degree to which many perceive these services as offering something distinct from what they expect from news media. These differences in expectations persist, even as many do say they regularly get news while using these companies' products. These differences are also likely to explain the considerably positive feelings that respondents in all four countries generally hold towards most platforms, even as many lack trust in the news they might find while using them.

Third, despite these net positive feelings, large segments of the public in all four countries do see a host of 'big problems' associated with digital platforms, ranging from false and misleading information to harassment to concern over data being used irresponsibly. Of course, not all platforms are viewed in the same way. In the UK and the US, such concerns were especially concentrated around Facebook, whereas in Brazil and India the public was less likely to differentiate between platform companies when expressing concern about such issues. For the most politically interested segments of the public, Facebook and WhatsApp are also seen as somewhat contentious places to talk about current affairs. Even though such disagreements over politics may largely be an extension of polarisation offline rather than a phenomenon unique to platforms themselves, they may add to the litany of problems that many associate with platforms. That, in turn, may contribute to more negative attitudes about the specific forms of news that platforms deliver.

Lastly, we also found that considerable portions of the public in all four countries held negative perceptions about the way journalists do their jobs, echoing findings in our report from last summer (Toff et al. 2021b). What is more striking is that social media was among the most frequently cited places many said they saw or heard criticism of news and journalism. That said, the source of such criticism was often ordinary people and friends, including in offline conversations and not simply online, which raises questions about the centrality of digital platforms in facilitating such negative discourse about news. In short, while news on platforms may be subject to far more scrutiny than news in a pre-digital era, any link between exposure to such criticism and declining levels of trust towards news cannot be assessed on the basis of this cross-sectional data alone.

Implications of our findings

As we have previously discussed (Toff et al. 2021a), as audiences devote more of their time and attention to using digital platforms, it poses countless challenges for news organisations around the world. As a trade-off for expanding reach and scale, newsrooms have often ceded considerable control to these outside companies in terms of how their content is distributed and how often and in what form their work appears on these services. Such relationships have been further strained as publishers become increasingly dependent on platforms to reach segments of the public least interested in consuming news through legacy modes, even as platforms themselves have pivoted to serving up other kinds of experiences farther removed from news, recognising that many of their most active users have less interest in such content, especially where politically contentious issues are involved.

The trust gap we document in this report is likely a reflection of this mismatch in audience perceptions about what platforms are for, the kinds of information they get when using these services, and how people think more generally about news media. It is possible, hence, that the main challenge for news organisations when it comes to building and sustaining audience trust is less about the specific problem of how their journalism is perceived when audiences encounter it online, and more about the broader problem of being seen at all, including on platforms. For relatively unknown brands and new entrants, there is a risk of 'guilt by association' when appearing in environments characterised by low trust in news. But for more established brands that audiences already have crystallised views about, the more fundamental issue is reaching people. Such problems are likely to be further compounded in the coming years by choices platforms make about the prominence of news on their services going forward, as several have announced their intentions to further prioritise user-generated content, following the approach of other platforms such as YouTube or TikTok. While surfacing many different new voices, it also seems probable that such strategies will reduce how frequently people are incidentally exposed to news from professional journalists working for media organisations when using the platforms in question, which raises new questions about the character and quality of the content featured instead-at least with regard to factual reporting on public affairs.

Where might this leave news organisations? To start, it further underscores the importance of cultivating brand familiarity by connecting with audiences both online and offline. Some of the least trusting audiences may not be users of digital platforms at all, and those who do use them may not look to such services as spaces where they typically seek to access news. Although we focus less on brand-specific trust in this report, we do find, as we have previously, that there exists a strong connection between using news more frequently and trusting it. Although news organisations are rightly conscious of the fact that younger audiences are devoting less time and attention to legacy media, a strategy to build brand loyalty through digital platforms alone puts news organisations at a significant disadvantage when platform companies shift their focus, or when audiences make clear they have minimal interest in conventional journalism there. While news organisations cannot simply ignore the way their content is seen on platforms, they cannot depend on them either as a basis for building lasting relationships with audiences.

Our findings also show the degree to which platforms differ. Audiences do perceive news on different platforms differently and say they use them for sometimes distinct purposes. That insight is an important one for news organisations that seek to engage with audiences in these spaces. The degree to which audiences may be more trusting of news on Google, for example, may point to the enduring importance of search engines in particular as spaces for exhibiting news content, even as social media and messaging apps have attracted relatively greater attention in recent years. Very different forms of news are likely to connect with audiences on search, where users are more likely to be seeking out information, than in social media spaces, where news may be seen as more of a distraction.

Finally, the findings in this report on the trust gap and those in our previous reports on other gaps in trust have indicated the existence of some more substantial challenges facing news media that go beyond the specific challenges involving any single news organisation's relationship with their audience. When half or more of the public think journalists serve the agendas of powerful politicians or care more about getting attention than reporting the facts, it suggests that for much of the public basic journalistic standards are perceived as largely absent, or at least rarely adhered to. While individual brands might seek to differentiate themselves by emphasising what makes their product superior in quality to their competitors, enduring negative preconceptions about what journalists do, much of which happens behind the scenes beyond the public's view, means that news outlets are largely engaged in defensive rearguard actions. That is true whether brands are engaging with audiences on platforms or in other spaces. Changing deep-seated ideas about journalism is a more fundamental challenge that may take industry-wide efforts to tackle. It is also one we hope to devote more attention to in the coming year.

About the authors ↑

Dr Camila Mont'Alverne is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow who works on the Trust in News Project. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the Federal University of Paraná, Brazil. Her main research interests are in the area of political communication, focusing on political journalism, media trust, and media and elections.

Dr Sumitra Badrinathan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow who works on the Trust in News Project and Assistant Professor of Political Science at American University, Washington DC. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include studying misinformation, media effects, and political behaviour in India using experimental and survey methods.

Dr Amy Ross Arguedas is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow who works on the Trust in News Project. She obtained her PhD in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University in 2020. Before pursuing her doctorate, Amy worked as a journalist for five years at the Costa Rican newspaper La Nación .

Dr Benjamin Toff leads the Trust in News Project as a Senior Research Fellow at the RISJ and is an Assistant Professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a bachelor's degree in Social Studies from Harvard University. He was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the RISJ from 2016 to 2017. Prior to his academic career, Dr Toff worked as a professional journalist, mostly as a researcher at the New York Times from 2005 to 2011.

Dr Richard Fletcher is the Director of Research at the RISJ and a principal investigator of the Trust in News Project. He is primarily interested in global trends in digital news consumption, comparative media research, the use of social media by journalists and news organisations, and, more broadly, the relationship between technology and journalism.

Professor Rasmus Kleis Nielsen is the Director of the RISJ and Professor of Political Communication at the University of Oxford. He is a principal investigator of the Trust in News Project. He was previously Director of Research at the RISJ. His work focuses on changes in the news media, political communication, and the role of digital technologies in both. He has done extensive research on journalism, American politics, and various forms of activism, and a significant amount of comparative work in Western Europe and beyond.

Acknowledgements ↑

For their assistance in conducting this research, the authors thank Chloe Snook, Claire Preston, Hugh Williams, Katharine Mullings, and Steven Watt at Ipsos. We are also grateful to Kate Hanneford-Smith, Alex Reid, Rebecca Edwards, and Louise Allcock for helping to move this project forward and keeping us on track, along with the rest of the research team at the RISJ for their feedback and input on this manuscript.

Published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism with the support of the Facebook Journalism Project.

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Appendix A: Technical summary ↑

This study has been designed and commissioned by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism's Trust in News Project to understand the role of digital platforms for trust in the news media in Brazil, India, the UK, and the US. Survey fieldwork was conducted by the research firm Ipsos during June and July 2022. In Brazil and India, where internet penetration is comparatively lower, surveys were fielded face-to-face using samples recruited by interviewers, who approached respondents by going door to door to reach the broadest spread of respondents. In the UK and the US, surveys were fielded online using panels owned by Ipsos and trusted suppliers. An additional supplementary data collection of a smaller number of questions was conducted online in the four markets in July 2022.

Ipsos was responsible for the fieldwork and provision of weighted data and tables only, and the RISJ was responsible for the design, reporting, and interpretation of the results. Although all survey methods have trade-offs with respect to achieving a fully representative sample, considerable efforts were taken to reach broad cross-sections of respondents in each country in the hopes of assembling samples that best approximate the relevant populations. In Brazil, sampling was conducted at a municipal level and included all macro regions in the country. In India, 19 states were represented, ensuring coverage of all macro regions. Face-to-face interviews were conducted door-to-door. In the UK and the US, participants were drawn from panels owned by Ipsos and trusted suppliers.

Sampling quotas were applied based on national populations. In the UK and the US, quotas were set on age, gender, and region, and in addition working status in the UK. In Brazil, quotas were set on age, gender, and social grade within a region, and on urban/rural locations within a region. In India, quotas were set on state, age, gender, and social grade across urban and rural locations. Additionally, post-survey weighting was applied to further improve the representativeness of the samples due to differences in non-response among subgroups. These quotas and weights are described in the table below.

Surveys were conducted primarily in Portuguese (Brazil) and English (the UK and the US). In the US, the survey was also provided in Spanish. In India, the questionnaire was translated into Hindi, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odiva, Tamil, and Teluga.

The survey questionnaire (15 minutes in length online and 25 minutes in person, on average) was generally the same across the four countries; however, some adjustments were necessary due to translation issues.

It is important to note that some of the questions included in the survey rely on recall, which is often imperfect or subject to biases. We have tried to mitigate these risks through careful questionnaire design and testing. On the other hand, surveys can be a good way of capturing fragmented media consumption across platforms (e.g. social media, messaging apps, and websites), people's attitudes towards them, and tracking activities and changes over time.

Due to a technical error, two of the four questions were inadvertently omitted from the original questionnaire. Given that recontacting respondents interviewed face-to-face in various locations around Brazil and India was not feasible, we decided to field an additional survey conducted entirely online in all four countries. This separate survey primarily included questions about reasons why people use Facebook, Google, WhatsApp, and YouTube. These online samples differ considerably from the main survey samples in Brazil and India. Respondents tended to be considerably more educated and likely to live in urban environments. This additional data collection was also conducted exclusively in English in India and in Portuguese in Brazil.

Full methodological reports concerning sampling techniques and complete questionnaires will be made available on our website.

Appendix B: Supplementary descriptive results ↑

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The trust gap: how and why news on digital platforms is viewed more sceptically versus news in general

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What role, if any, do social media, search engines, and messaging apps play in eroding the public's confidence in the news media? In virtual roundtable discussions with small groups of journalists and publishers last year (Toff et al.

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O problema da grande ocorrência de desinformação, discurso de ódio e violência política está relacionado ao modelo de negócios das plataformas, sendo, portanto, estrutural. Conteúdos com essas características geram mais engajamento, sendo, portanto, lucrativos para as empresas.

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“Só porque alguém é governador ou presidente não significa que seu discurso deva ter uma plataforma”, diz o professor Joshua M. Scacco, da Universidade do Texas, que estuda como novas tecnologias influenciam a mídia, o governo e as instituições nas democracias. “Alguns líderes políticos populistas estão usando as regras do jornalismo, o treinamento dos jornalistas, contra eles mesmos”, complementa.

https://apublica.org/sentinela/2022/09/com-democracia-sob-ameaca-jornalismo-precisa-mudar-diz-pesquisador-americano/

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"Só porque alguém é governador ou presidente não significa que seu discurso deva ter uma plataforma", diz o professor Joshua M. Scacco, da Universidade do Texas, que estuda como novas tecnologias influenciam a mídia, o governo e as instituições nas democracias. "Alguns líderes políticos populistas estão usando as regras do jornalismo, o treinamento dos jornalistas, contra eles mesmos", complementa.

Na avaliação do pesquisador, esse pensamento se aplica tanto para os EUA, como para o Brasil: por lá, ele avalia que a invasão ao Capitólio deixou feridas no país que ainda não foram sanadas e podem colocar em xeque a democracia no país.

Aqui, ele aponta que a repercussão sem críticas de falas antidemocráticas podem mais ajudar a criar uma situação de caos do que evitá-las. "Uma das coisas que os jornalistas deveriam estar fazendo neste momento é desescalar essas situações, porque os líderes políticos estão contando com essa escalada para conseguir jogar a imprensa contra as pessoas", sugere. O pesquisador explica que, nos EUA, "uma das coisas que queremos estabelecer é a diferença entre o 'direito de fala' e o 'direito de alcance' - essa diferença faz sentido, segundo ele, na política de "desplataformização" de agentes que usam as plataformas para espalhar Fake News.

Nesta entrevista para a Agência Pública, ele fala também sobre veículos jornalísticos que se alinham a políticos antidemocráticos e acabam se tornando parte do ambiente desinformativo. "Uma das razões pelas quais esse tipo de discurso chegou até a Casa Branca e a Donald Trump foi porque a Fox News o trazia de espaços de direita e de extrema-direita onde havia má-informação e desinformação", diz.

Joshua Scacco, professor da Universidade do Texas

Desde o ataque ao Capitólio nos EUA, nós brasileiros temos nos perguntado se um evento similar pode ocorrer no Brasil, durante ou após as eleições deste ano. O senhor acredita que isso é possível e, se for, o que o jornalismo e as instituições podem fazer para evitar?
O Brasil e os Estados Unidos têm estruturas democráticas muito diferentes em termos de como ocorre o voto, em termos de instituições democráticas em geral, assim como [têm] cidadãos muito diferentes. É preciso ter cuidado com as comparações e pensar particularmente sobre como a cobertura jornalística em si pode estar promovendo esse tipo de possibilidade que ainda não aconteceu.

No momento, os jornalistas deveriam estar lidando com o que já se sabe, não com as incógnitas. E a razão para isso é que líderes políticos ao redor do mundo, inclusive nos Estados Unidos e no Brasil, participam da economia da atenção.

Algumas das coisas que os políticos dizem, incluindo falas antidemocráticas - desde ameaças contra jornalistas e indivíduos até provocações às estruturas da democracia - são feitas porque eles sabem que isso atrai atenção. Por isso, uma das coisas que os jornalistas deveriam estar pensando e fazendo neste momento é desescalar essas situações, porque os líderes políticos estão contando com essa escalada para conseguir jogar a imprensa contra as pessoas.

As redações e os jornalistas deveriam estar se preparando agora para pensar em como eles vão cobrir as eleições de modo que o foco seja a democracia e não necessariamente apenas os candidatos e as coisas que eles dizem.

Para Scacco, jornalistas deveriam aprender a "desescalar" situações perigosas

Evitar o jornalismo declaratório é um ponto válido. No entanto, é inegável que existam ameaças à democracia ou mais claramente ao sistema eleitoral. Como fazer reportagens sobre isso? Como foi a cobertura nos EUA e qual sua avaliação sobre erros e acertos?
Eu acho, em primeiro lugar, que a cobertura da mídia nos Estados Unidos não é culpada pelo que aconteceu em 6 de janeiro de 2021 [a invasão do Capitólio]. Donald Trump é o culpado pelo que aconteceu. É importante [dizer isso] porque, no final das contas, o presidente que está no comando tem que assumir a responsabilidade.

Em segundo lugar, os meios de comunicação não entenderam a realidade de Donald Trump durante toda a sua presidência. Isso é muito claro. A forma como o cobriram espalhou suas mensagens antidemocráticas ainda mais do que teria acontecido apenas no Twitter. Os jornalistas estavam jogando com a economia da atenção, porque sabiam que cobrir Donald Trump potencialmente atrairia os espectadores.

O que precisamos pensar é: como os jornalistas podem reorientar o foco da atenção nesses momentos específicos em que temos líderes que querem basicamente incendiar a democracia?

Os jornalistas são alguns dos principais defensores da democracia nessa situação, sendo capazes de alertar as pessoas mas também de educá-las sobre como a democracia funciona.

Não se trata apenas de dizer às pessoas que a transferência pacífica do poder é a marca registrada da democracia. Nós ouvimos isso o tempo todo. Ouvimos em todo discurso de posse - nos Estados Unidos, a cada quatro anos: a transferência pacífica de poder é a marca registrada da democracia. No entanto, se você perguntar à maioria das pessoas, elas não saberiam dizer o que isso significa.

Por isso, os jornalistas têm um papel a cumprir nesse sentido, explicando aos indivíduos por que a transferência pacífica do poder é importante, como ela mantém as pessoas seguras. Em 6 de janeiro nos Estados Unidos, pessoas morreram no Capitólio. A transferência pacífica do poder também garante que a vontade dos eleitores seja ouvida e executada no novo governo. Então esse enquadramento dos fatos, das notícias, é muito diferente do que [apenas noticiar que] "o candidato X diz que não aceitará o resultado da eleição".
Mais de dois anos após o ataque, como é a percepção da população sobre o evento. Há algum consenso?
O que a gente vê é que, pelo menos com relação às pesquisas de opinião pública, a reação se tornou altamente polarizada, com o evento sendo justificado e/ou minimizado por grande parte dos republicanos. Entre os democratas e cada vez mais entre os independentes também, depois do fato, depois das audiências [sobre a invasão do Capitólio no Congresso] dizendo que foi um incidente preocupante.

A linguagem que foi usada e que os pesquisadores têm usado para classificar o evento é que foi uma tentativa de golpe - e os Estados Unidos nunca estiveram em posição de [ter que] usar esse tipo de linguagem antes. E eu acho que os líderes políticos hesitam em fazer isso, porque muitos acham que isso não poderia acontecer nos Estados Unidos. E o que vimos é que pode.

Esse tipo de ação precisa ter consequências. É isso que os líderes do Congresso e o Departamento de Justiça estão analisando. E eles determinarão se indivíduos específicos devem ou não ser responsabilizados.

Pesquisador afirma que invasão ao Capitólio deixou feridas no país

Uma das saídas para o jornalismo cobrir líderes políticos que espalham desinformação é a checagem de fatos. Você considera que a checagem tem cumprido seu papel?
Eu acho que o fact-checking, quando bem feito, é muito eficaz. O desafio é que os jornalistas escrevem matérias de maneiras específicas que, às vezes, dão destaque primeiro para a má-informação e a desinformação.

O que os jornalistas precisam pensar é em como dar destaque às informações corretas primeiro, que então neutraliza as informações incorretas [mencionadas] em outra parte da notícia. A maioria das pessoas que estão lendo ou assistindo às notícias só vão chegar às primeiras linhas, às manchetes, aos primeiros parágrafos ou primeiros minutos das notícias.

O tempo de atenção é variável, e há muitas opções de mídia por aí. Então os jornalistas precisam ser estratégicos e pensar em como eles podem publicizar as informações corretas no momento adequado para potencialmente neutralizar as informações falsas que estão por aí.

Isso não significa necessariamente que jornalistas não podem citar diretamente líderes políticos. Significa que eles [também] devem considerar outros fatores quando julgam que é necessário citar esse líder. Só porque alguém é governador ou presidente não significa que seu discurso deva ter uma plataforma em um determinado meio de comunicação.

Também existem mecanismos de equilíbrio aos quais os jornalistas precisam se atentar, como o fato de a alegação ser ou não apoiada por evidências empíricas; se há de fato ou não evidências para a alegação.

Os jornalistas têm uma função de guardiães da democracia por uma razão. Os jornalistas não são estenógrafos de políticos.
Um aspecto importante da difusão de mensagens antidemocráticas são as redes sociais. Qual é sua visão sobre o banimento de conteúdos nas redes?
Uma das coisas que queremos estabelecer é a diferença entre o "direito de fala" e o "direito de alcance". Nos Estados Unidos, a liberdade de expressão é protegida pela Primeira Emenda à Constituição. No entanto, nas redes sociais, os indivíduos não têm [esse mesmo] direito à liberdade de expressão. São empresas privadas que desenvolveram essas plataformas, e elas podem decidir como administrá-las como bem entenderem.

Dito isso, também precisamos pensar sobre essa questão: só porque alguém pode parar em uma esquina e ficar dizendo o que quiser ou quase tudo que quiser, isso não significa que [essa fala] precise ser transmitida ou receber uma plataforma mais ampla.

A pessoa exerceu sua liberdade de expressão, mas a decisão sobre se e como esse discurso alcançará as pessoas é uma questão completamente diferente. Então, quando pensamos em algo como "desplataformização" funciona, sim. [Essa prática] tem o efeito de tirar o alcance que uma pessoa em particular já teve anteriormente. Ela pode causar um atrito a mais em termos da disseminação de desinformação.
Por outro lado, há um crescimento de plataformas que se posicionam como lugares de liberdade irrestrita de fala, contrárias a qualquer moderação de conteúdo, mesmo de discursos de ódio. Algumas delas, como o Gettr, são inclusive favoráveis ao presidente Trump e a Bolsonaro. Como você avalia isso?
Se você puder conter esses conteúdos nocivos nesses espaços, isso já é uma vitória neste momento em particular. Seria perigoso para o governo intervir e possivelmente tentar derrubar esses espaços.

Dito isso, também tem a questão, por exemplo, de os jornalistas decidirem ou não cobrir o que está acontecendo nesses lugares e como cobri-los. Muitas vezes, é essa cobertura que leva [esses conteúdos] para fora desses espaços. Se esses espaços estão atraindo pessoas, [ainda] é um número relativamente pequeno - o que eu acho importante.

No entanto, isso também pode ter implicações. Se olharmos para o 6 de janeiro, não precisou de muita gente para se envolver nessas ações. Mas uma sociedade livre, com informações livres e públicas, sempre terá esse equilíbrio entre onde paramos e traçamos o limite para [garantir] a segurança e proteção de outras pessoas. E isso não é necessariamente um limite que eu esteja qualificado para definir.

Jornais que se alinham a políticos antidemocráticos como a Fox News acabam se tornando parte do ambiente desinformativo

Falamos muito sobre discurso de ódio em plataformas na internet, mas há também uma responsabilidade de veículos tradicionais que por diversas razões se alinham a políticos e reproduzem discursos extremistas. Reportagens recentes têm mostrado o papel da Fox News em difundir mensagens extremistas. Como você avalia isso?
Há pesquisas excelentes sobre isso: que uma das razões pelas quais esse tipo de discurso chegou até a Casa Branca e a Donald Trump foi porque a Fox News o trazia de espaços de direita e de extrema-direita onde havia má-informação e desinformação. Portanto, a Fox News era totalmente parte do fluxo de desinformação que entrava na Casa Branca, e fazia igualmente parte do fluxo de desinformação que saía da Casa Branca.

Por outro lado, havia jornalistas na Fox News, por exemplo, Chris Wallace, que às vezes se opunha às afirmações de Donald Trump sobre a imprensa ser inimiga do povo. E isso é extremamente importante porque, para combater esse tipo de propaganda e de bolhas de desinformação, você tem que ter fontes de dentro do partido político que está produzindo essa desinformação, de dentro do contexto de onde a desinformação vem, para poder tentar abrir buracos nesse tipo de argumento conspiratório. E esse foi o papel que vimos Chris Wallace fazendo.

Desde então, Chris Wallace já deixou a Fox News. Até alguns mecanismos internos da Fox News para tentar garantir conteúdos corretos foram minimizados desde a eleição.

O desafio é maior nos programas de opinião da Fox News e o tipo de estratégia que eles têm usado para fazer basicamente com que seus espectadores continuem voltando para ter sempre mais. E isso não é uma prática isolada da Fox News.

*Colaborou Bárbara D'Osualdo

Seja aliada da Pública

Investigar as ameaças à democracia é nossa forma de protegê-la.

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Com democracia sob ameaça, jornalismo precisa mudar, diz pesquisador americano - Agência Pública

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"Só porque alguém é governador ou presidente não significa que seu discurso deva ter uma plataforma", diz o professor Joshua M. Scacco, da Universidade do Texas, que estuda como novas tecnologias influenciam a mídia, o governo e as instituições nas democracias. "Alguns líderes políticos populistas estão usando as regras do jornalismo, o treinamento dos jornalistas, contra eles mesmos", complementa.

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Pouco mais de um ano após ser fundada por um grupo de 30 organizações jornalísticas brasileiras, a Associação de Jornalismo Digital (Ajor) ultrapassou recentemente a marca de 100 associadas, um feito para a entidade dedicada a fortelecer o jornalismo digital no Brasil. O crescimento da associação evidencia a diversidade do setor no país, que a Ajor pretende ajudar a ser reconhecido também por sua importância econômica.

https://latamjournalismreview.org/pt-br/articles/ajor-chega-a-100-associadas-com-foco-na-sustentabilidade-do-jornalismo-digital-brasileiro/

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LatAm Journalism Review by the Knight Center

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Pouco mais de um ano após ser fundada por um grupo de 30 organizações jornalísticas brasileiras, a Associação de Jornalismo Digital (Ajor) ultrapassou recentemente a marca de 100 associadas, um feito para a entidade dedicada a fortelecer o jornalismo digital no Brasil. O crescimento da associação evidencia a diversidade do setor no país, que a Ajor pretende ajudar a ser reconhecido também por sua importância econômica.

"Essa marca é muito importante para nós", disse Natalia Viana, presidente da Ajor, à LatAm Journalism Review (LJR). A Ajor tem hoje, segundo ela, 101 organizações associadas, superando outras entidades do tipo no país como a Associação Nacional de Jornais (ANJ), que tem 99 associados, e a Associação Nacional de Editores de Revistas (Aner), que tem 38.

"A Ajor já é uma das maiores associações de veículos do Brasil em número de associadas, e vamos seguir crescendo, porque o mercado está em evolução", disse Viana, salientando que o crescimento da associação também é representativo da diversidade do jornalismo online no Brasil.

As organizações reunidas na Ajor se dedicam tanto à cobertura generalista, como o Portal Terra, quanto especializada, como o site A Economia B; há também produtoras de podcast, como a Trovão Mídia, e o canal do YouTube MyNews. "A Ajor está conseguindo reunir essas organizações tão diferentes, mas com um objetivo comum, que é crescer e solidificar o jornalismo de qualidade diverso por todo o país", afirmou a presidente da entidade.

O processo de associação à Ajor é "bastante criterioso e cuidadoso", afirmou Viana. As postulantes devem aderir ao Código de Conduta da entidade, que inclui critérios relacionados à organização institucional do meio e também diretrizes de boas práticas editoriais e organizacionais.

"Essas questões são avaliadas individualmente para cada uma das pleiteantes e discutidas com bastante critério e cuidado nas reuniões do Conselho Executivo e Deliberativo, formado nesse momento por 10 organizações que foram eleitas pelo conjunto das associadas", explicou ela. O intuito é "garantir que as associadas da Ajor estejam realizando e promovendo bom jornalismo e com a perspectiva de se solidificarem no mercado enquanto negócios viáveis".

A principal missão da Ajor, segundo Viana, é fortalecer as associadas "institucionalmente e em termos de plano de negócios". Em pouco mais de um ano, a entidade se estabeleceu como "uma das vozes de defesa do jornalismo e dos jornalistas" no atual contexto de ataque ao jornalismo no Brasil, mas também se tornou "uma organização muito atuante no fortalecimento institucional de novas iniciativas de jornalismo com a perspectiva de torná-las sustentáveis e de tornar o setor do jornalismo digital um dos setores reconhecidos na sociedade não só pela sua importância para a democracia, que é fundamental, mas também pela sua importância econômica", disse ela.

De acordo com Viana, as 101 organizações associadas à Ajor "já empregam milhares de jornalistas". "Esse setor de startups de jornalismo já se tornou um espaço ou uma oportunidade viável para estudantes de jornalismo e para jornalistas que querem empreender. Então a Ajor está se tornando também uma referência no jornalismo empreendedor no Brasil e vai seguir nesse caminho, se fortalecendo cada vez mais", disse ela.

Espaço seguro e parcerias

A Ajor foi lançada oficialmente no dia 7 de junho de 2021, depois de meses de articulação entre as organizações jornalísticas que realizam o Festival 3i - Jornalismo Inovador, Inspirador e Independente e outras organizações convidadas. A associação teve o apoio do Centro Knight para o Jornalismo nas Américas em sua criação e estruturação, baseado na experiência do Centro Knight no auxílio à formação de organizações como a Associação Brasileira de Jornalismo Investigativo (Abraji) e o Foro de Periodismo Argentino (Fopea), entre outras.

Desde antes de seu lançamento oficial, a Ajor realiza quinzenalmente as Conversas em Off, encontros online para trocas entre os membros em um espaço seguro. Nestas conversas são debatidos temas estratégicos às organizações de maneira sigilosa, com troca de experiências e ajuda mútua entre as associadas. Este espaço permite que as organizações aprendam umas com as outras e o fomento de boas práticas editoriais e institucionais.

Maia Gonçalves Fortes, secretária executiva da Ajor, disse à LJR que as organizações que participam das Conversas em Off se comprometem a respeitar este espaço confidencial e a não levar o que é compartilhado ali para fora daquele ambiente. As organizações são convidadas a falar sobre temas propostos pelas próprias associadas.

"Já fizemos encontros sobre como foi adaptar seu site à LGPD [Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados Pessoais, que entrou em vigor no Brasil em 2018], como fazer uma boa newsletter, como preparar um orçamento de projeto, o que é estratégia de produtos, e como 'celetizar' sua equipe [contratar funcionários com carteira de trabalho assinada]", disse Fortes.

Ela também comentou que a Ajor tem realizado parcerias com empresas e outras organizações que têm contribuído no fortalecimento institucional e do plano de negócios de suas associadas. Entre elas estão o programa Acelerando a Transformação Digital, parceria da Ajor com o Centro Internacional para Jornalistas (ICFJ, na sigla em inglês) e apoio da Meta (anteriormente conhecida como Facebook), por meio do Meta Journalism Project, e a segunda edição do GNI Startups Lab, realizado pela Google News Initiative e desenvolvido em parceria com a Ajor.

Segundo Fortes, as sessões de treinamento do Acelerando a Transformação Digital, realizadas no primeiro semestre de 2022, foram elaboradas a partir de pesquisa de interesses realizada com as associadas à Ajor, que expressaram o desejo de aprender mais sobre gestão e modelo de negócios. A segunda fase do programa consistiu em mentoria e grants para o desenvolvimento de projetos, e todas as 15 organizações selecionadas eram associadas à Ajor, disse a secretária executiva da associação.

Já na segunda edição do GNI Startups Lab, que começou em agosto e vai até dezembro, 12 dos 16 meios selecionados são associados à Ajor, disse Fortes. Eles receberão US$ 20 mil em financiamento e participarão de "workshops e treinamento, com acompanhamento individual, sobre temas fundamentais para a viabilidade financeira de um meio jornalístico, estratégia de negócio, identidade de produto, vendas, marketing, construção de comunidade e captação de recursos", segundo o comunicado sobre o programa no Blog do Google Brasil.

O Jornal Plural é uma das associadas à Ajor que foi selecionada para os dois programas. O site, fundado em janeiro de 2019, faz jornalismo local na cidade de Curitiba, capital do estado do Paraná, na região Sul do Brasil. A equipe de 12 pessoas - três delas sócias co-fundadoras - produz e distribui conteúdo via site, redes sociais, podcasts, newsletter e YouTube.

Rogério Galindo, um dos co-fundadores do Plural, contou à LJR que a participação no Acelerando a Transformação Digital foi "sensacional". Depois de participar das sessões de treinamento, o meio foi selecionado em dois editais do programa, que financiaram a realização de dois projetos do Plural. O primeiro, Periferias Plurais, ofereceu oficinas gratuitas de jornalismo a jovens da periferia de Curitiba, a partir das quais foram selecionados seis jovens que hoje são "correspondentes de periferia" do site, contribuindo com dois conteúdos por mês sobre seus bairros de origem e recebendo uma bolsa de R$ 500.

"Eles estudam, trabalham, então na verdade esta não pode ser a atividade principal deles", disse Galindo. "Então com dois conteúdos por mês de cada um, 12 no total a cada mês, temos uma cobertura legal de periferias que só foi possível graças ao projeto, ao financiamento, tanto para a gente poder montar as oficinas como para oferecer as bolsas para eles. (...) Para o Plural, é [um projeto] essencial para a gente ter um material que é inédito e importante para a cidade, e para eles também é uma oportunidade interessante", afirmou.

O segundo projeto do Plural selecionado no programa está relacionado à checagem de informação durante o período eleitoral no Brasil, com a criação de um curso via WhatsApp sobre como identificar "fake news" nas eleições. "Também é um projeto que consideramos muito importante para nós e para a sociedade, e estamos muito felizes por o financiamento do projeto ter permitido isso, e também pela intermediação da Ajor, que foi fundamental", disse Galindo.

O GNI Startups Lab, em curso no momento, também tem tido impacto na organização e no trabalho do Plural, disse ele. "Além do subsídio financeiro, que é super importante para nós, tem essa parte da mentoria, de nos ajudar a entender os processos do Google, os processos de SEO, e como organizar uma startup, que no fundo é o que nós somos. Estamos na quinta semana do programa e já aprendemos bastante coisa, e estamos inclusive reformulando algumas coisas no jornal em função disso", contou.

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Ajor chega a 100 associadas com foco na sustentabilidade do jornalismo digital brasileiro - LatAm Journalism Review by the Knight Center

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Pouco mais de um ano após ser fundada por um grupo de 30 organizações jornalísticas brasileiras, a Associação de Jornalismo Digital (Ajor) ultrapassou recentemente a marca de 100 associadas, um feito para a entidade dedicada a fortelecer o jornalismo digital no Brasil.

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A intersecção entre violência e política, entre garantia de direitos, segurança e apoio a regimes democráticos tem ficado mais latente, e, no Brasil, as eleições de 2022, que se aproximam, ocorrerão em clima de insegurança, ataque e sob alegação de fraude, com ânimos exaltados e em um cenário de polarização que tem crescido desde 2013. E é destas intersecções e da necessidade de compreendê-las profundamente que nasce esta pesquisa. Lançada logo após o 7 de setembro de 2022, data que marcou os 200 anos da Independência do Brasil, a pesquisa busca entender a percepção da população brasileira acerca do autoritarismo, da agenda de direitos – típica das democracias – e sua satisfação e apoio ao próprio regime democrático.

https://forumseguranca.org.br/publicacoes_posts/violencia-e-democracia-panorama-brasileiro-pre-eleicoes-2022/

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Violência e democracia: panorama brasileiro pré-eleições 2022 - Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública

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O estudo “Violência e Democracia: panorama brasileiro pré-eleições de 2022 – Percepções sobre medo de Violência, Autoritarismo e Democracia” é uma realização do Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública (FBSP), em parceria com a Rede de Ação Política pela Sustentabilidade (RAPS), e com apoio do Fundo Ca…

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Indicadores de engajamento no jornalismo

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Indicadores de engajamento no jornalismo

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Como as pessoas que confiam pouco em fontes jornalísticas decidem em quais publicações confiar? Essa é a pergunta central por trás de um estudo do projeto Trust in News do Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. A resposta: as pessoas fazem julgamentos rápidos — julgamentos instantâneos, conforme definem os responsáveis pelo estudo — na hora de avaliar as notícias. Essas decisões apressadas se baseiam em uma gama de elementos que as pessoas observam, incluindo o veículo em si e as pessoas que compartilharam as matérias.

https://ijnet.org/pt-br/story/6-indicadores-para-engajamento-de-quem-desconfia-do-jornalismo

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6 indicadores para engajamento de quem desconfia do jornalismo

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Como as pessoas que confiam pouco em fontes jornalísticas decidem em quais publicações confiar? Essa é a pergunta central por trás de um estudo do projeto Trust in News do Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

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Eis mais uma competência exigida aos novos currículos: design.

https://ijnet.org/pt-br/story/design-no-jornalismo-como-embalar-not%C3%ADcia-para-se-destacar-nas-redes-sociais

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Há inegável beleza no Jornalismo quando reúne dois ingredientes: ética e estética. Muito se fala do primeiro como uma lista de regras morais da profissão. Pouco se discute sobre a importância do segundo como elemento fundamental de comunicação - que vai além da notícia bem apurada. Um texto fluído com palavras adequadas, um vídeo com fotografia surpreendente, um áudio editado com maestria elevam a qualidade de uma peça jornalística.

Parece óbvio aos meus colegas de estrada a obrigatoriedade do senso estético às produções já conhecidas: jornal, televisão e rádio. O que pode ser novo é aplicar beleza nas notícias divulgadas no ambiente digital, principalmente nas redes sociais. Eis mais uma competência exigida aos novos currículos: design. Recurso, esse, importante para quem precisa embalar uma notícia e chamar atenção do público e do algoritmo.

Entendi a relevância do recurso visual quando ainda trabalhava em redação e observava o trabalho do diagramador das páginas. Ou quando escrevi a capa inteira do jornal na forma de histórias em quadrinhos. Hoje, vejo o design como uma das habilidades básicas de qualquer comunicador. E mais gente pensa assim.

A jornalista Pâmella Cardoso se formou em 2017. Na época, o mercado exigia apenas ter bom texto. Mas com a expansão do mundo digital e o fechamento de muitos veículos impressos, ela precisou apurar o senso estético para fazer publicações atrativas na internet. "No meio de um arsenal de informações, é preciso reter a atenção do leitor", comenta. Ela se tornou estudiosa do tema e compartilha dicas de como criar informações visualmente interessantes no perfil do Instagram.

Por conta dessa iniciativa, inclusive, Cardoso foi contratada por um dos maiores portais de notícias de Brasília, o Metrópoles. "Há uma equipe específica de design do site e das redes. Entretanto, cerca de 90% dos jornalistas do meu setor usam ferramentas de design com frequência na execução das tarefas", explica. De tanto estudar a respeito e testar, ela faz artes para as redes sociais, relatórios de desempenho, apresentações e até livros eletrônicos.

Jornalismo que precisa aparecer

A recomendação é buscar referências e treinar em sites intuitivos como o Canva. Em julho deste ano, eu e Cardoso montamos um grupo de jornalistas interessados no assunto. O projeto durou 7 dias e se chamou Desafio Melancia. O nome faz referência à expressão de colocar uma fruta grande na cabeça e se destacar. Os 25 participantes receberam videoaulas com truques e tarefas para criar publicações atrativas no Instagram.

Uma das participantes foi Tathiana Campolina, que tem 16 anos de Jornalismo. Ela é coordenadora de comunicação e faz freelas de gerenciamento de redes sociais para 4 clientes. Ela produz nove artes para as redes sociais por semana e o projeto do desafio contribuiu para que ela aprimorasse o trabalho. Além de imagens, ela se empenha em aprender a fazer vídeos com ferramentas como Canva, Filmora Go e InShot. "Temos que ser multi para garantir espaço no mercado de trabalho", diz Campolina.

Publicação de Pâmella Cardoso sobre o Desafio Melancia

Outra participante foi a assessora de imprensa Lucíola Correa. No caso dela, a decisão de participar do desafio foi pelo desejo de dar agilidade ao serviço que oferece. "Se você deixar a estética de lado, não tem como tornar uma pauta atrativa para os colegas das redações ou produzir conteúdo interessante para os clientes", aponta.

Além disso, Correa está na fase de fazer o reposicionamento da própria marca profissional e acredita que os aprendizados de design vão ajudá-la nesta etapa. Ela acrescenta que a habilidade de embrulhar esteticamente releases e notícias é um diferencial para o jornalista que quer se atualizar. "A missão é acompanhar a inovação dos equipamentos e conseguir levar isso para a rotina do trabalho", finaliza.

Design como valor estratégico

Unir Jornalismo com o Design também é a preocupação do publicitário, Eudes Nogueira, de 25 anos. Desde os 17, ele atua como designer e já realizou peças para campanhas de diversas empresas: e-books, embalagens e, claro, artes para redes sociais. Nogueira traz uma nova visão: o design como estratégia.

"A mensagem é composta por meios verbais, visuais ou sonoros. A conexão entre eles potencializa a comunicação. Dominar o design fortalece a forma de se comunicar. Nas redes sociais, por exemplo, há mais critérios para definir cores, formas e texturas", explica Nogueira. "Assim, o profissional garante que aquele conjunto de elementos reflita o que se quer dizer por meio de informações organizadas e claras. Portanto, entender design é um fator estratégico, e não somente estético".

A composição de elementos visuais, como cores, formas e letras, faz parte desse universo de informação. Em um mundo onde um sem-número de notícias disputam atenção em telas de rolagem rápida, saber como se destacar é valioso. E isso pode ser feito por meio de imagens harmônicas, de confortável leitura e interação.

Aqui vão algumas dicas práticas de Nogueira para ter resultado imediato:

-Respeite as margens do papel, página ou post:

Não é impossível atingir a excelência ética e estética em todos os formatos de mídia. E sem surpresas. Há 1.800, o filósofo Plotino já nos adiantava: "Eis o que experimentamos quando entramos em contato com a beleza: o maravilhamento, um súbito deleite, o desejo, o amor e uma alegre excitação".
Foto da capa: arquivo pessoal Eudes Nogueira

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Design no Jornalismo: como embalar a notícia para se destacar nas redes sociais

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Há inegável beleza no Jornalismo quando reúne dois ingredientes: ética e estética. Muito se fala do primeiro como uma lista de regras morais da profissão. Pouco se discute sobre a importância do segundo como elemento fundamental de comunicação - que vai além da notícia bem apurada.

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Demandas dos jornalistas aos presidenciáveis

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Demandas dos jornalistas aos presidenciáveis

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A Federação Nacional dos Jornalistas (FENAJ) encaminha nesta semana, aos candidatos e candidatas à Presidência da República, sua plataforma para as eleições de 2022. Denominado “Oito Pautas Prioritárias das e dos Jornalistas Brasileiros”, o documento elenca as principais demandas debatidas e aprovadas nos últimos congressos nacionais da entidade, além de propostas históricas da categoria.