A German study finds rising trust in social media over traditional news, particularly among younger adults, a shift relevant to how Christian media reach and are trusted by audiences online.
A new study, the Social-Media-Atlas 2026, finds that 43 per cent of Germans now trust social media posts more than editorial news, up six points on the previous year, with trust exceeding half among 20 to 49 year olds. The same survey found most users have encountered content on platforms such as Facebook and TikTok that they suspected was misleading. For Christian media organisations, this is a double signal: the channels where audiences increasingly place trust are also the ones where quality control is weakest, raising the stakes for how Christian content is produced and presented there. Personal recommendation from friends and family plays a large role in what people believe, which matters for how church communities share content informally.
ECMS 2026 similarly finds a generational pattern, with 40 per cent of under-35s trusting social media as a source compared with 14 per cent of over-55s, echoing the age split reported in the German study.
Source: ECMS 2026