TL;DR
Over one million Dutch adults now get news solely from social media, though only 12% trust what they find there. The 2026 Digital News Report shows news interest and trust declining across the Netherlands, with younger users turning to influencers and AI chatbots.
More than one million people in the Netherlands now rely exclusively on social media for news, according to the 2026 Digital News Report published on Tuesday. They use no news websites, no television, no radio, and only 12% say they trust what they encounter on those platforms.
The group represents 7% of Dutch adults, up from 2% in 2018. The annual study, produced by the Dutch media regulator Commissariaat voor de Media with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, describes the pattern as a paradox: the platforms people distrust most are the ones a growing number depend on entirely.
A broader disengagement
The shift is not just about where people get news. It is about whether they want it at all.
In 2018, 61% of Dutch people said they had a lot of interest in news. That figure has dropped to 45%, while the share saying they have no interest rose from 4% to 14%.
The trend is global. Across the 48 markets the Reuters Institute surveyed, news interest has fallen 13 percentage points in five years, and social and video platforms have overtaken both television and news websites as the primary way people encounter news for the first time.
The influencer pipeline
The shift is sharpest among the young. For 33% of 18- to 34-year-olds in the Netherlands, social media is now the main source of news, up from 20% in 2018.
Half of 18- to 24-year-olds follow so-called news influencers, accounts that comment on or repackage reporting from a position young audiences increasingly treat as authoritative. The most followed in the Netherlands is Cestmocro, an anonymous Instagram channel with 1.2 million followers and no publicly known owner.
Platforms such as Facebook have actively deprioritised news publishers in favour of personal content, pushing users toward algorithmic feeds and influencer accounts for current affairs. A smaller but growing group has moved beyond social feeds entirely: around 7% of Dutch adults now use AI chatbots for news, rising to 13% among younger people.
Google’s AI-powered search overhaul and the rise of tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity are accelerating that trend. The Reuters Institute found that weekly chatbot use for news climbed from 7% to 10% across its surveyed markets in a single year.
Trusted names, eroding ground
Established outlets still hold an advantage. NOS remains the most trusted news brand in the Netherlands, followed by press agency ANP and RTL Nieuws.
But the ground beneath them is shifting. The share of Dutch people who distrust the news outright has roughly doubled since 2018, from 11% to 21%, part of a global pattern in which weaponised misinformation has eroded confidence in reporting across dozens of countries.
Globally, trust has hit a record low. Just 25% of people across all markets say they trust the news most of the time, the lowest figure since the report began in 2015.
What the Netherlands stands to lose
The EU’s Digital Services Act imposes transparency and content-moderation obligations on large platforms, and the Netherlands is among the countries enforcing it. Yet the behavioural shift the report documents, a million people making social media their sole news source, is not a problem platform rules alone can solve.
CvdM chair Amma Asante said trust in Dutch news remains high by international standards. “So we have something to lose that we have to protect,” she said.
Half of all Dutch people now say they worry about the news that circulates on social platforms. The paradox is that worry has not stopped the drift.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
