One Million Dutch Residents Get Their News Only From Social Media — and Just 12% Trust It

More than a million people in the Netherlands have given up traditional sources of information entirely and get their news exclusively through social networks. Only 12% of them trust what they read there.

The scale of the phenomenon

According to the Digital News Report 2026, the annual study from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, the "social-only" group of news consumers in the Netherlands has grown from 2% to 7% of the adult population over the past few years. In absolute terms, that is more than a million people, comparable to the audience of the country's largest national news outlet.

These people have cut conventional media channels out of their information lives. They do not visit newspaper or TV station websites, do not watch TV news broadcasts, and do not listen to the radio. Their only source of information about what is happening in the world is an algorithmic feed on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X, or messaging apps.

Importantly, this is not only a youth phenomenon. Young people are disproportionately represented in the group, but "social-only" users also include older people, who once read newspapers but gradually moved to the platforms as their main information space.

The paradox: they don't trust it, but they don't look elsewhere

The study's central anomaly is the sharp gap between consumption and trust. Among those who get news only from social media:

• Only 12% trust the information they encounter there
• Most admit that they regularly see unreliable or distorted material
• Despite this, they do not turn to alternative news sources
• People under 35 make up a disproportionately large share of this audience
• The fastest-growing format is short video on Reels, Shorts, and TikTok

The researchers explain the pattern as structural dependence: social networks have become the default screen for engaging with the world, and news appears there as a side effect of constant presence on the platforms, not as a conscious information choice. The problem is not that people prefer social media, but that many have stopped noticing that they have a choice at all.

The wider European context

The Netherlands is traditionally regarded as a country with a high level of media literacy and a developed market for quality journalism. Even so, the trend shows up here just as clearly as in countries with a less mature media environment. This suggests the problem is structural rather than cultural: it is built into the architecture of the platforms themselves.

The Digital News Report 2026 covers more than 40 countries and records a similar picture across Western Europe: traditional media audiences are shrinking, overall trust in news is falling, and the share of people who depend entirely on platforms keeps growing.

"Social media fills the vacuum not because people trust it, but simply

because it is everywhere," the report's authors state.

Platform algorithms are optimized for engagement, not for informational value. News content ends up in the same feed as entertainment and advertising, and the line between fact and interpretation blurs. This environment produces the "consume without trusting" phenomenon: habit proves stronger than critical judgment.

What this means

The paradox of low trust alongside high dependence is a serious challenge for the media market, advertisers, and regulators. Traditional media are losing audiences not only to competition from the platforms, but also because a significant share of people have stopped actively looking for alternatives.

The next question is whether platforms will be held responsible for the quality of the information they distribute, or whether it will remain a problem for journalism, which fewer and fewer people read.

*Meta has been designated an extremist organization and is banned in Russia.