More and more people are getting their news online. This worries those that think the internet and the technologies that underpin it will produce highly polarised news environments, with little potential for the shared debate that well-functioning democracies need. But data from our 2017 Reuters Institute Digital News Report shows that polarisation of online news audiences varies dramatically from country to country, even in nations with similar levels of technological development.
Our survey shows that the internet now rivals television as people’s main source of news in most of the 36 countries we looked at – and under-35s have a particularly strong