Do online influencer posts count as news? Younger Canadians more likely to say yes

Younger Canadians are more likely to say posts from influencers and online memes count as news, while the amount of news content on social media has dropped, a new report says.

“News organizations have long acted as information gatekeepers, determining which information reaches the public,” says the report from McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, released Tuesday.

“However, Canadians are now exposed to a wide variety of content producers, from influencers to citizen journalists, memes, and AI-generated posts, blurring the boundaries of what counts as ‘news’ and making perceptions of newsworthiness increasingly subjective.”

Respondents were asked to rate different types of content that described a major political event on a scale from “definitely not news” (zero points) to “definitely news” (10 points).

Those between 18 and 34 years old rated posts from influencers at between five and six on the scale, while Canadians over 55 rated such posts at three to four.

Memes or parodies describing the theoretical major event were only somewhat less likely to be ranked as news. The youngest group ranked them at close to five and the oldest group at three.

Among all age groups, posts from media organizations were most likely to be ranked as news, while AI-generated content describing the event was least likely to be considered news.

“Overall, the findings suggest that younger Canadians hold a broader, more inclusive understanding of what constitutes news, extending beyond traditional media to encompass a wider range of social media content,” the report says.

“Older Canadians, by contrast, maintain a more restrictive definition that prioritizes institutional and professional sources.”

The online survey of just under 1,520 respondents used Leger’s online panel and was conducted between Jan. 8 and Jan. 13, 2026. The Canadian Research Insights Council, an industry organization that promotes polling standards, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population.

Researchers also found there is less news content now on some major social platforms than there was in 2023.

They examined a data set of nearly nine million posts from 856 Canadian news organizations on Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, TikTok and Bluesky between January 2023 and December 2025.

In 2023, Meta banned news content from its platforms in Canada, including Facebook and Instagram, in response to the federal government’s Online News Act.

The report says posts from news organizations on X fell by half, while “TikTok, YouTube, and Bluesky only partly fill the gap.”

It says while the reason for the decline in posts on X “is difficult to fully attribute, the decline coincides with growing disengagement by news organizations under [Elon] Musk’s ownership and the governance changes that followed.”

Overall, news “has become fragmented, with different outlets active on different platforms and lower access to local journalism,” the report says.

While readers used to be able to find most news organizations on one platform, the report says, they now see only a fraction of the news content that is available and have to turn to multiple platforms to stay informed.

The researchers also used artificial intelligence to analyze more than 160,000 YouTube and TikTok videos. They found news accounts focus on reporting, while influencer content is a mix of reporting, opinion and analysis.

The report says “the content Canadians — especially younger Canadians — increasingly accept as news is systematically different from the journalistic content it is displacing.”

It says younger Canadians “hold a broader definition of what counts as news, are less likely to seek news out deliberately, and are more reliant on platforms where influencers dominate engagement.”

“If the content they consume as news increasingly lacks the sourcing and verification standards of journalism, the informational inputs to their political awareness change — even if they do not perceive the shift.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 30, 2026.