TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — A third of Taiwanese people trust the news they consume, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s annual Digital News Report.

The 2024 edition of the Reuters Institute report released in June surveyed 2,011 people and found that 33% think they can trust the news of the day most of the time, an increase of 5% from the previous year’s survey. Taiwan’s trust in the media is the second lowest of the countries surveyed in the Asia-Pacific region according to the report, ahead of South Korea with 31%.

The highest level of trust in the media for the region was found in Hong Kong, where 55% said they trust most news, up 16 points from last year.

Among the most trusted media outlets in Taiwan were business magazines. Business Weekly took the top spot comfortably, trusted by 59% of respondents. That is compared to 8% who said they distrust it and 33% who said they were neutral.

The outlets that most said they distrust were SETN (31%), Formosa TV News (27%), and the Liberty Times (25%). All three outlets received trust ratings of about 40% each from respondents.

Meanwhile, the relevance of digital news outlets to Taiwanese news consumers continues to increase, with a third of respondents saying they share news via social media, messengers, or email. The top social, messaging, and video networks in Taiwan for news were YouTube (46%), Line (41%), and Facebook (39%), according to the survey.

Short videos also appeared popular, with 78% of Taiwanese respondents saying they watch videos of a few minutes or less for news weekly. Taiwan’s use of short videos for news was the same as that of Indonesia, while Thailand reported the highest usage (87%) and Japan the lowest (39%).

Lin Lih-yun (林麗雲), a professor at National Taiwan University's Graduate Institute of Journalism, wrote in the report that TikTok had been a news source for some during Taiwan’s recent presidential election. The report found that 19% of Taiwanese respondents use TikTok generally, and 8% use it for news.

Lin said the Taiwan People’s Party presidential candidate Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) used TikTok successfully. “His TikTok posts sometimes attract more than 1.5 million views, and he duly received a quarter of the popular vote, succeeding in his goal of denying any party an overall majority,” she said.

The report also showed that AI-produced news was being adopted by some outlets in Taiwan. 

Lin noted that AI-produced anchors were used by Formosa TV News, who she said is considering creating a Taiwanese language version of the anchor. She also noted that public broadcaster PTS will cooperate with Japan’s NHK to produce a Taiwan version of an AI sign language anchor for the Tokyo 2025 Deaflympics.

Globally, the Reuters Institute report found that Facebook use for news was on the decline, and YouTube was used as a news source by almost a third of the worldwide sample each week. “Short news videos are accessed by two-thirds (66%) of our sample each week, with longer formats attracting around half (51%),” the report stated.

The report found TikTok had overtaken X in terms of popularity as a news source for the first time globally. It also found an “increasing focus on partisan commentators, influencers, and young news creators, especially on YouTube and TikTok.”