Across Africa, people still want news. The problem is they trust it less, encounter it differently, and rely on platforms their parents never heard of.
The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026, released by the University of Oxford and covering nearly 100,000 respondents across 48 markets, paints a picture that should alarm editors, rattle newsroom managers, and compel media investors to reconsider everything.
Trust in news fell in 29 of the 48 markets surveyed, reaching its lowest point since the Reuters Institute began tracking the metric in 2015. The global average now sits at 37%, down 3 percentage points in a single year. Against that backdrop, Africa tells a complicated, more textured story.
Africa Bucked the Global Trust Collapse, Partially
Kenya and Nigeria record overall trust figures of 68%, placing them joint first among all 48 markets surveyed. South Africa, by contrast, dropped 5 percentage points, one of the steepest declines globally, sitting alongside the United States, Bulgaria, and the United Kingdom. Morocco holds its ground at 28%, unchanged from last year but still well below the global average.
In Kenya and Nigeria, where internet penetration remains low at 35% and 41% respectively, the survey samples skew toward younger, urban, English-speaking respondents. The report is explicit on this limitation: “Data from India, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa are representative of younger English-speakers and not the national population.” Trust figures for these markets likely overstate confidence in news among the wider population.
That caveat aside, the headline numbers still reveal something real. Brand trust in Kenya is striking. Citizen TV records 91% trust among respondents, matched by the Daily Nation, NTV, and BBC News. The Standard scores 90%. These are extraordinary figures compared to the United States, where trust in news overall sits at 25%, and politically right-leaning Americans trust news at just 15%.
Social Media Now Owns the News Day
The report identifies platformisation as the defining shift of this era: “Social media and video networks are now the most widely used sources of news globally, ahead of both TV news and news organisations’ own online properties in terms of the proportion of people using them weekly.”
In Africa, this trend runs deeper and faster than almost anywhere else. Kenya records the highest TikTok news usage in the world at 58%, and the highest YouTube news usage globally at 66%. Nigeria is not far behind, with TikTok at 46% and YouTube at 54%. These are not marginal shifts. They represent a wholesale migration of where attention lives.
A separate Kenya media survey conducted in April 2026 by The Media Council of Kenya, covering 3,774 Kenyans aged 15 and above across all 47 counties, found that 39% of Kenyans now say social media is their primary news source, placing it above both TV and radio. WhatsApp leads individual platforms at around 20%, followed by Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Telegram. The Reuters Institute’s own 2026 data show WhatsApp reached 62% of the Kenyan survey sample for news, up 16 percentage points from the previous year.
As Khusoko reported in May 2025, this shift had already begun to accelerate. Kenya’s 2024 State of Media Survey, launched at the Annual Media Summit themed “Public Interest in the Era of Technology: Media Accountability and National Values,” confirmed social media had overtaken television and radio as the nation’s primary news source, with 33% of respondents citing social media, against 31% for television and 26% for radio.
WhatsApp functions differently in Kenya than in most Western markets. It does not serve simply as a messaging tool. The report describes it as “a key channel for circulating political information and rumours, and for mobilisation.” During the June 2024 protests against Kenya’s Finance Bill, platforms like TikTok and Instagram became the primary channels through which young Kenyans accessed real-time video and commentary. Legacy outlets struggled to match the speed or tone. A Reuters Institute study found that a youth collective amassed over 15 million video views and post interactions on Facebook and Instagram during those protests, while Citizen TV followed with slightly more than 10 million interactions.
The Creator Economy Reshapes Who Counts as a Journalist
Across markets, 27% of respondents say they consume news from creators or influencers at least weekly. That figure reaches 58% in Kenya and remains high in Nigeria, where Facebook (81% of respondents) and YouTube (78%) dominate social consumption.
The report identifies Kenya as one of the most creator-dependent media markets in the world. A third of the Kenyan survey sample says creators meet all or most of their news needs — a figure that stands at around 7% exclusively relying on creators. The report notes: “Proportionately, a small number of countries seem particularly dependent on creators. In Kenya, a third of our sample (33%) say that all or most of their news needs are met by creators.”
In Nigeria, creators increasingly function as curators and amplifiers. They shape which stories gain traction, how they get framed, and which political voices reach scale. Research on the Digital News Report 2025 found that the most mentioned news creators centre on commentary, many pushing partisan messages that are often more opinionated than commentary on traditional media, much of it from the political right.
The report draws a direct correlation: markets where social media dominates news consumption also produce the highest dependence on creators. Nigeria and Kenya sit at the far end of that spectrum. Northern European markets, where trust remains relatively strong and legacy media retains audience share, sit at the opposite end.
Morocco: A Public Sphere Pulling in Two Directions
Morocco’s story in the 2026 report stands apart from the rest of the continent. Youth-led protests in autumn 2025, organised through Discord and social media platforms over concerns about health, education, and spending priorities around the FIFA World Cup, shook the country’s media establishment. Official outlets responded with a strategic opening, giving broader visibility to grievances they had previously ignored. Yet the legal environment remained tight.
Overall trust in news in Morocco holds at 28%, unchanged from 2024 but nine points below the global average. Fake news concern is significant at 54%, and 46% of respondents say they sometimes or often avoid news. The report describes the tension plainly: “Morocco’s challenge is therefore not simply a digital transition. It is the emergence of a more active yet more sceptical public, one that consumes, shares, and comments on news while remaining unconvinced by much of the wider information system.”
Facebook leads news consumption in Morocco at 59%, up 12 percentage points in a single year. Hespress, a digital-native brand, leads online weekly reach at 52%. YouTube creators and independent digital voices have grown into genuine alternatives to broadcast news, with Mustapha Swinga’s Aji Tfham channel surpassing one million followers. These creators are “not necessarily seen as more reliable than mainstream outlets, but they are often experienced as faster, closer, and easier to understand,” the report notes.
South Africa Faces Trust Erosion and Foreign Interference
South Africa tells the most uncomfortable story of the four African markets. Trust fell 5 percentage points to what the report suggests sits below the global average, one of the steepest drops recorded. At the same time, the media market faces structural stress. The Mail & Guardian cut 12 people from a newsroom of just 25 permanent staff. Legacy print closures that began with Media24 in 2024 continue to ripple through the sector.
The emergence of new digital creators partially offsets these losses. The Debrief Network, founded in 2025 by former News24 editor Qaanitah Hunter, explicitly targets audiences who “currently live outside the news cycle.” But alongside mission-driven outlets, the report notes a surge of conservative commentators replicating techniques from the American right-wing creator economy.
Foreign information interference adds a layer that no other African market in the survey confronts as directly. Forbidden Stories reported on brokered payments to South African online outlets to publish pro-Russian content. OpenAI documented a ChatGPT user who generated at least 38 pro-Kremlin articles, most published on South African news sites under a fictitious byline. An SABC journalist was suspended over allegations of accepting payment for a source’s contact details. The report frames these events as evidence that “trust in news overall has been eroding, not least because of incursions into the media ecosystem by foreign states.”
Google’s R688 million (approximately US$40 million) media support package, confirmed through South Africa’s Competition Commission process, offers some structural relief. An initial R10.7 million injection reached 23 digital news projects through the Association of Independent Publishers. Whether this represents a genuine reset or a brief respite remains to be seen.
Kenya’s Ownership Crisis at Nation Media Group
The report dedicates unusual attention to a structural shift that carries long-term implications for press independence across East Africa. In 2026, Tanzanian businessman Rostam Aziz acquired a controlling stake in Nation Media Group, East Africa’s largest media house.
The report acknowledges that “this does not automatically translate into editorial interference” and notes that Aziz has publicly committed to safeguarding editorial independence. But the context gives the report’s authors pause: the Aga Khan’s Development Network, which previously controlled NMG, provided “a degree of insulation from direct political and commercial pressures.” Aziz brings a different profile — a politically connected regional figure with extensive business ties and documented connections to Tanzania’s ruling party.
At the same time, Kenya’s government reportedly owes KSh 866 million (about US$6.7 million) in delayed advertising payments to major legacy groups including NMG, Standard Group, and Mediamax. Press freedom observers have raised concerns that these delayed payments function as financial leverage over editorial independence.
Kenya’s Media Crisis: Debt, Dependency, and the Fight to Stay on Air
AI Enters African Newsrooms at Uneven Speed
Globally, weekly use of AI chatbots for news grew from 7% to 10% between 2025 and 2026. The report attributes this growth largely to markets in “Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as well as Southern and Eastern Europe — markets where platformisation of news is stronger.” Africa’s two highest-usage AI markets are Nigeria and Kenya, which rank among the leading markets globally for AI chatbot news use.
Nigeria provides the clearest picture of institutional experimentation. Nation Media Group introduced a formal AI policy framework in 2026, covering editorial and business operations with commitments to transparency. The Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development inducted 33 organisations into its Nigeria AI Collective. JournoTECH introduced NewsAssist AI. NativeAI, developed by the International Centre for Investigative Reporting, produces automated transcription and translation that recognises local accents and languages.
South Africa sits at a different stage. Wits University’s 2025 State of the Newsroom report identifies South Africa as among the continent’s leaders in AI experimentation. News24 appointed a head of AI strategy. Community newspapers like The Pondoland Times are using AI to drive digital advertising revenue. But a Stellenbosch University report found that most journalists use AI cautiously, often manually checking results, which reduces the efficiency gains the technology is meant to deliver.
Fake News Fear Runs Highest in Nigeria and Kenya
Concern about misinformation globally reached 62% of respondents, up 4 percentage points. The report identifies Nigeria and Kenya as the two markets with the highest levels of concern about what is real and what is fake online — ahead of the United Kingdom, Australia, and Portugal.
This matters because the markets with the highest fake news concern also show the highest social media news consumption. The report plots this correlation directly, with Nigeria and Kenya appearing at the extreme top-right of the chart, combining very high fake news worry with very high social media reliance. Morocco and South Africa also feature in the upper reaches of this distribution.
The paradox the report identifies is not unique to Africa but plays out most intensely here: “Audiences have a keen sense of these environments being less trustworthy, while continuing to rely on them because they remain the most convenient places to encounter other types of information.”
What This Means for African Media
Three threads run through every African market in this report.
First, social platforms now dominate the news journey. This is not a prediction. It is the current state. News organisations that treat their own websites or broadcast schedules as the primary product face structural irrelevance among younger, urban audiences. The audience moved. The question is whether journalism follows.
Second, trust in institutions is falling but trust in specific brands remains strong in Kenya and Nigeria. This creates a narrowing window for legacy outlets that maintain credibility. Citizen TV, the Daily Nation, Channels Television, and The Punch all record brand trust above 85% among their audiences. The challenge is that these audiences find their content on platforms — YouTube, TikTok, WhatsApp — rather than through direct brand relationships.
Third, the business model crisis is inseparable from the independence crisis. In Kenya, government advertising arrears create financial dependency that constrains editorial decisions. In Nigeria, Big Tech platforms capture advertising revenue while using publisher content to train AI models without compensation. In South Africa, foreign-funded disinformation pays local outlets to publish fabricated stories. These are not separate problems. They feed each other.
The report closes its foreword with a note that applies as directly to Nairobi and Lagos as it does to London or New York:
“In an age of accelerating change, we hope this report remains a critical resource for journalists, news organisation leaders, emerging news producers, and policymakers.”
In Africa, those three groups face the same structural forces as their counterparts elsewhere. They operate with thinner margins, weaker legal protections, and faster-moving audience shifts. The 2026 data confirm that African news consumers have not given up on journalism. What they have given up on is waiting for journalism to find them.
The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026 covers 48 markets and nearly 100,000 respondents. The African markets covered are Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, and South Africa. Data from Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa represent online, predominantly English-speaking samples and are not nationally representative.
