Germans are significantly less interested in news; only 57 per cent of adult internet users are still interested in information about current affairs. That is ten percentage points less than last year. The decline is most visible in the group of 18 to 24 year-olds, in which only 31 per cent are interested in news, which is 19 percentage points less. At the same time, the percentage of those who at least occasionally try to avoid the news rises to 65 per cent. Topic fatigue, causing a bad mood and exhaustion due to the vast amount of information are the main reasons for this. In addition, young people in particular do not perceive news as important or useful to them personally.

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Almost half of the adult online users in Germany (46%) state that they have seen false or misleading information about Covid-19 within one week. The greatest concerns about encountering false information about the coronavirus are towards Facebook (28%) and messenger apps (14 %) as well as towards activists as senders (31%). Journalistic actors play only a minor role from the respondents’ point of view (6%). These are the results of the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2021, for which the Leibniz Institute for Media Research in Hamburg conducted the German part of the study. The study is based on 92,372 respondents from 46 countries on six continents.

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