Have a look at any group chat full of 20-somethings and you’ll spot it fast. Nobody’s sharing headlines. Nobody’s forwarding a push alert. What lands in the chat is a clip or a stitched video or some creator in their bedroom walking through what happened in about ninety seconds. That habit is quietly changing who gets believed and I think it deserves a proper look.
How Gen Z Actually Gets Its News
The Reuters Institute has been tracking this for years and the story hasn’t wobbled much. Younger people are way more likely to start their day on TikTok, Instagram or YouTube than on a news homepage. A lot of them never visit a publisher’s site at all. The news just finds them while they’re doing something else, which is a long way from the family-around-the-telly, six o’clock bulletin routine their parents grew up with.
Now, the older takes love to call this laziness. I don’t buy it. From what I’ve seen, it’s more about convenience and tone. A creator sounds like a person. A newsreader sounds like an institution. If you grew up on DMs and group chats, the first one just feels more honest, even when it isn’t.
Personality-led media has been climbing for a while now. Writers who’ve built a following around a clear point of view, Maddison Dwyer among them, show how much a recognisable voice counts these days. People don’t only read the content. They follow the person behind it.
Why Creators Feel More Credible
Trust used to come from the masthead. These days it comes from familiarity. Watch someone every day for two years and you start to feel like you know them and that feeling does a surprising amount of the heavy lifting that editorial standards once did.
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A few things feed into it:
- Perceived honesty. Creators say “I’m not sure about this one,” laugh at their own stuff-ups and show how they got to a conclusion. Institutions almost never do.
- Speed. A creator can react to a breaking story within minutes. A newsroom has to verify, edit and run it past the lawyers.
- Relatability. They’re often the same age as their audience and talk the same way, with the same frustrations.
- Two-way contact. Comments, replies and live streams make the whole thing feel like a conversation instead of a broadcast.
You can see the same pattern outside of news. Money is a good example. Plenty of young Australians now pick up what they know about super, share investing and renters’ rights from creators, not from banks or government pamphlets. Some of those creators are brilliant and source everything carefully. Others are repeating something they half-heard on a podcast. The viewer usually can’t tell which is which and that’s where it gets dicey.
Health and fitness run on the same engine. A trainer with a million followers can change how people think about supplements practically overnight and there’s no peer review anywhere in sight.
Where Media Literacy Gets Tested
Trust built on personality has an obvious soft spot. It’s only as solid as the person carrying it. A newsroom has editors, correction policies and real legal exposure. A solo creator has a ring light and a posting schedule.
That doesn’t make creators the bad guys. Plenty are careful and a few know their beat better than the journalists covering it. But the safeguards are optional instead of built in and audiences should know that going in.
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The clearest example I can think of is gambling content. Pokies and online casino promotion has moved onto social platforms in a big way and much of it comes from streamers and influencers who look like friendly peers, not advertisers. A clip of someone landing a huge win feels like harmless entertainment. Often it’s a paid placement and it almost never mentions how rarely a normal session ends like that. Australian regulators have flagged influencer-led gambling promotion more than once, especially its reach among younger people and honestly the concern is fair. When the person pushing the product looks like your mate, that usual voice in your head that questions a sales pitch just goes quiet.
This is exactly where media literacy earns its keep. A few habits go a long way:
- Check whether the creator discloses sponsorships and affiliate links and whether they do it clearly rather than burying it in a caption.
- Look for the original source behind a claim, not only the confident summary of it.
- Ask yourself what the creator gets if you believe them.
- Cross-check anything that matters against at least one outlet with a published corrections process.
None of that’s complicated. The hard part is turning it into a reflex instead of a chore.
What Comes Next for Trust Online
I don’t think the answer is dragging young audiences back to traditional outlets. That ship’s sailed and to be fair, the outlets haven’t always earned the return trip. A more realistic path is for creators to pick up the habits that made institutions trustworthy to begin with: visible sourcing, clear disclosure and quick corrections. Some already do. The audiences who reward that behaviour will end up shaping what credibility looks like over the next decade and the sooner disclosure becomes something people expect instead of a nice bonus, the healthier this whole shift will be.
