LAST week, the results of the annual Reuters Institute Digital News Report survey revealed an alarming decline in Filipinos’ trust in news, falling 10 percentage points from last year’s survey to an all-time low of 28 percent. This is of course of great concern to media outlets like The Manila Times, and will certainly inspire a great deal of discussion here about how we can improve our outreach and audience perceptions, although we were a part of the group of individual media brands that retained trust ratings significantly higher than Filipinos’ trust in news overall.
The Reuters Institute survey was careful to make the point that Filipinos’ net distrust in news was broad-based, and not necessarily directed at the “traditional” media; as a matter of fact, the distrust could be said to be directed more toward social media and self-styled independent media, for the simple reason that a majority of Filipinos now prefer to access news through platforms such as Facebook (the most popular), TikTok, Instagram and various streaming platforms, and a majority of those prefer sources other than the social media channels maintained by mainstream news outlets.
However, there is a bit of a paradox in all of this, and it is revealed in two different ways. First, the same Reuters Institute survey found that slightly more than half of Filipinos engage in “news avoidance” at least some of the time, and that the percentages of those who said they seek out news on a daily or more frequent basis dropped sharply from last year’s numbers, and from 2020, which was the first year the survey was conducted. Second, fully two-thirds of Filipinos said they are “concerned” about whether or not the news they view online, from whatever source, is factual and not “AI-generated.”
This last concern reflects a number of other recent studies that have shown a growing “fatigue” among online audiences due to the overwhelming proliferation of so-called “AI slop” — quickly produced, low-quality, AI-generated content of little useful substance, or worse, containing misleading or outright false information. The insight also comes at a time when automated users, or “bots,” outnumber human users on the internet; a recent analysis by the web service firm Cloudflare found that 57 percent of internet traffic is generated by bots, while only 43 percent is generated by human users.
Yet it is not just the characteristics of the online environment that erode trust in news. The Reuters Institute study also pointed out that in countries where trust declined the most year-on-year and over the past five years, there were conditions of “political instability and divisive elections,” direct attacks on journalists and news organizations, and “a noisier and more fragmented information environment” both online and offline.
From our perspective as a news organization, the pathways to solutions to improving public trust in the news, and for that matter, encouraging the public to not actively avoid news and information they need are limited. Despite their occasional reassurances that they will more strictly police artificial content and fake news – for example, YouTube recently announced it would begin scrubbing AI-generated videos from its platform – the social media platforms are no help, and really cannot be without changing their fundamental business model. That model treats all content, regardless if it’s in-depth news and analysis, carefully crafted artistic or informative work by humans, or AI slop, as a generic commodity because it prioritizes simple engagement (views, likes and shares) over subject matter and quality. A politically chaotic and divisive environment is obviously something beyond our control as well. Our mission is to faithfully report the news factually and completely, whatever the news is.
In the final analysis, none of us who are media practitioners, whether traditional news organizations, purely online media enterprises, or individual independent journalists can control our environment. We can, of course, continue to challenge the social media platforms’ enabling and encouragement of “AI slop,” disinformation, and other valueless content, as well as government’s continued complacency toward harassment of the media. But if the real problem is public trust in the media, then providing news and information the public can trust must be, and will always be at the center of our efforts. Finding ways to do that in a constantly evolving information environment will be a constant challenge, but we are open to suggestions. After all, we are here for you, not for our own sake.
