The annual Digital News Report from Reuters has been released and the Canadian highlights are included below. The results are based on surveys conducted prior to the pandemic (January 16 to February 25, 2020). View the Canadian report by clicking here.
- In the 2020 survey, 65% of Canadian respondents say they are concerned about the truthfulness of news on the internet, an increase of four percentage points from 2019. Internationally, the share of respondents with this concern is 56%.
- For 36% of Canadian respondents, contents on Facebook elicit the most concern about false and misleading information online. Next come contents of news sites and news applications, with 16% of respondents being mostly concerned about them.
- As for the origin of false and misleading news online, 31% of Canadians are most concerned about news from the country’s politicians, while 17% are most concerned about foreign politicians.
- More than half of Canadian respondents (53%) think the media should prominently report a statement by a politician even if it could be false. That said, a similar proportion of Canadians (54%) think technology platforms have a responsibility to block potentially inaccurate advertisements by politicians.
- Trust in the news is down in Canada, but is still higher than it is internationally; in the 2020 survey, 44% of Canadian respondents say they trust most news most of the time.
- In Canada, 53% of respondents prefer to get news from sources that don’t have a particular point of view, and Francophones seem more likely than Anglophones to get news from sources that challenge their point of view.
- One-third of Canadian participants (33%) say they listened to a podcast in the month preceding the survey, up 4 percentage points from 2019. Even so, Canada remains out of step with the complete international sample (41%). Podcasts are especially popular with younger respondents: 53% of Canadians aged 18 to 34 years old listened to at least one podcast during the reference period.
