Understanding Gen Z audiences: Preliminary findings on social news use and trust

Social media, including messaging apps, have become valuable resources to citizens, allowing immediate access to quality information and news. Digital platforms are used as communication channels within social networks, allowing individuals maintain their social relationships. Within these social networks, citizens are increasingly sharing information that are relevant to their everyday lives. “Connection” and “sharing” are now rearticulated as affordances of social media platforms (Bucher, & Helmond, 2018), which are increasingly reshaping the way of seeking, accessing and disseminating information. According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2018, the use of messaging apps to share news has grown, with half of news consumers using messaging apps such as WhatsApp for news (Newman et al., 2018), indicating an increasing preference for more private and less confrontational spaces to communicate as a medium of information sharing. This report also recognises the growing trend of information sharing via social media platforms, in particular messaging apps, where content sharing is related to groups’ own interests and collective identities rather than general public interests, more pointing out that social platforms are becoming increasingly popular places to seek reliable information.