Study finds young people living in Portugal find the news sad, scary and boring

by Margarida Maneta and Mariana Muller, Lusófona University, CICANT, Portugal.

The project YouNDigital – Youth, News and Digital Citizenship, based at Lusófona University/CICANT (Portugal), aims to bring insights into how younger generations are engaging with the news landscape and their citizenship.

After completing nearly a year of fieldwork where complementary methods were used, we are glad to offer first-hand results on this topic. The report Milestone 3 – End of fieldwork also covers the steps of in-depth fieldwork with different data collection techniques: a national online survey applied to young people aged 15 to 24 years old (n=1300), including young people living in protective institutions or residential support situation (n=62) and 42 semi-structured interviews and media diaries with young people (15-24).

Data collection considered different dimensions of news consumption: routines, media used, people they turn to know what is going on the world, contexts of trust and avoidance of news, level of understanding of algorithms and datafication.

Preliminary findings of the national survey indicate that most young people choose negative adjectives when asked to describe the news. For the young people living in Portugal, most news pieces are “sad” (45.6%; n=593), “scary” (35.6%; n=463), and “boring” (25.0%; n=325).

Instagrammers (45.9%; n=596), Youtubers (45.4%; n=590), journalists (42.2%; n=549), and Tiktokers (35.7%; n=464) are the most mentioned sources to find out what’s going on in the world. Moreover, in their daily routines, young people obtain information through social networks (76%; n=539), family members (69.5%; n=583), friends (65.5%; n=424), and online platforms (57.6%; n=593).

Semi-structured interviews allowed us to identify the central role of social networks in young people’s lives and their topics of interest in news consumption. Traditional media outlets occupy a less important place in their lives and television is often related to family habits of parents and grandparents. Subjects that can affect their mental health or mood (for example, war and racism) are frequent reasons to avoid consuming news. Topics related to diversity (feminism, anti-racism, and issues linked to the LGBTQIAPN+ movement) appeared frequently in the interviews, most of the time as relevant subjects.

The interviewed young people also considered that algorithms make it easier to get information on a daily basis, although some are concerned about its implications, as the following excerpts reveal:

“For example, a person who has no interest in the LGBT community won’t be constantly bombed with LGBT news because they’re not part of it. And the news they get about it will probably be negative.”  André, 21 years old                                                                                                                   

“If I opened TikTok now and contents that come up don’t interest me, I probably won’t open it tomorrow.”    Luís, 19 years old            

“On the one hand, it’s good [algorithms], but on the other, we’re also not getting information about a topic, which can be relevant… I don’t think it’s good or bad.” Catarina, 20 years old

Regarding digital news consumption and socialization, interviewees state that people around them (such as family and friends) often ask for help to check whether an online news piece is true or false.

These and other findings can be read in the full report.

This year the YouNDigital project has released a public online database focused on youth, news and digital citizenship that comprises literature from the beginning of the 21st century. Our database is always open to improvements thus, if you wish to contribute, you can do it here.

YouNDigital – Youth, News and Citizenship (PTDC/COM-OUT/0243/2021) is a research project based in Lusófona University, CICANT, Portugal, and funded by The Foundation for Science and Technology (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia – FCT). The initiative is pioneeringly studying the link between young people, news, and their digital citizenship, seeking to understand these fluid dynamics in a deeply digitized society and facilitating training in the area. The project is coordinated by Maria José Brites (CICANT, Lusófona University) and Teresa Sofia Castro (CICANT, Lusófona University).

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