A global survey shows power continuing to move from publishers to platforms, with AI playing a growing role.
In June, the Reuters Institute at Oxford released its annual Digital News Report , offering a wealth of insight into changes unfolding in news consumption around the world.
The report’s main finding is that for the time in its fifteen-year history, platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube are more popular sources of news, on a global average, than TV and legacy news venues. But only slightly. While some 54 per cent of users report getting their news from platforms, 52 per cent still get it from TV and 51 per cent from news sites and apps directly.
The report contains many other details likely to be helpful to people in all parts of the news ecosystem trying to sort out where things are headed. Among the clearest trends is that people under 35 are moving toward platforms and video, and away from TV, radio, and especially newspapers.
While only 30 per cent of users identify social media and video platforms as their main source of news, and only 12 per cent rely on these exclusively, younger people are much more likely to rely on platforms. The report also finds little reason to expect them simply to adopt the news habits of older generations as they age. Over the past five years, use of news sites and apps has fallen by 12 percentage points, and use of TV news by 13 points.
The drift toward platforms will give companies like Meta and Google and their algorithms increasing power over the way news is shared, presented, and even produced — and therefore, increasing power over the democratic deliberation and debate that once took place mainly through traditional media, including print, radio, and TV.
What about the impact of AI on news consumption?
Jul 7, 2026
Age verification and police reporting obligations on AI will come with a cost
The summer break has given us more time to assess the flurry of bills tabled in Parliament in the final weeks of June relating to privacy, AI, and the internet. One of them, the Safe Social Media Act, in Bill C-34 , has been much in the news in recent weeks, with questions about how the ban on children under 16 holding social media accounts will work and whether it’s constitutional.
I’ve weighed in on whether a ban would infringe young people’s freedom of expression under the Charter, and how the bill’s various obligations on AI providers might change how we interact with chatbots.
Here I address another question people have been asking: how will Bill C-34 affect our privacy? Can age verification be made effective without forcing all of us to divulge and put at risk sensitive information? And would obligations on AI providers to notify police about certain chats make AI less private?
In both cases, we can look to other countries where similar measures have been imposed for evidence of how they affect privacy. We don’t have to speculate.
In short, we can’t have effective age verification or police reporting in AI without harming rights to privacy and expression. The promise of safer social media and AI in C-34 will either have to be broken or bought at too high a cost.
Jun 19, 2026
The House has passed the lawful access bill with amendments, still leaving crucial issues in question
The committee tasked with Bill C-22 worked past midnight Wednesday to meet the government’s goal of completing third reading of the bill before the House took its summer break, which begins today. The government curtailed clause-by-clause review of the bill for this purpose, resulting in the committee’s adopting only a few amendments, and without much discussion or public disclosure.
I highlight two changes worth noting that touch on issues that generated the most criticism during the committee hearings: the bill’s potential impact on encryption and its metadata retention provisions.
The first set is being touted as a step forward, but it may not be.
Jun 16, 2026
It will regulate the content of our conversations, but also the bonds we forge
Among the many dangers we often hear about in coverage of AI, some of the most concerning involve cases where a chatbot encourages a person to commit suicide or aids in the commission of a violent offence. Other, less extreme cases of harm involve people developing unhealthy psychological relationships with chatbots, relying on them for erroneous medical or legal advice.
Bill C-34, Canada’s new Safe Social Media Act , tabled last week, imposes a new set of duties on the AI companies behind ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini that may push them to do more to prevent these various harms. While most of the coverage of the bill has so far focused on the social media ban for those under 16, another important aspect is that it represents Canada’s first attempt to regulate the behaviour of conversational AI systems themselves.
The bill will seek to minimize harmful outputs, but more broadly, it will regulate the kinds of relationships these systems are allowed to form with users.
Jun 11, 2026
A first look at Bill C-34 , Canada’s new Safe Social Media Act, and how the under-16 ban might work
The federal government introduced Bill C-34 yesterday, its third attempt at online harms legislation after the failure to pass Bill C-63 last year.
Most of the media coverage has focused on the ban on social media accounts for children under 16, giving rise to the question of how this will work in practice. Will we all now need to provide platforms with proof that we’re over 16? And what will this entail?
It’s not entirely clear yet. One of the main takeaways of the bill is that details around how the ban will work, along with many duties and obligations the bill imposes, are left to regulations to be passed in the future — or to self-regulation — leaving many things unclear. But the general thrust of where we’re headed is coming into view.