Beyond the Fourth Estate : The Impact of Abandoning Traditional News Media on Trust in Public Authorities, Among Social Media News Consumers in Sweden

Sammanfattning

Earlier research has linked news consumption through social media to lower trust in public institutions, but the existing evidence rests largely on comparisons between social media news consumers and less frequent users or non-users. The present study addresses a different question. Among individuals who already consume news through social media, what is the effect on trust in public authorities of doing so without also relying on traditional editorially curated news outlets? Using data from the National SOM Survey 2024, the study compares respondents whose news diet consists exclusively of social media (the treated group) with hybrid respondents whose social media news consumption is accompanied by regular contact with traditional outlets (the control group). Because the treatment has not been randomly assigned, the analysis proceeds through propensity score matching on a set of eight pre-treatment covariates, followed by a proportional odds logistic regression and a Wilcoxon signed-rank test on the matched sample. The estimated treatment effect on the treated is negative and statistically significant across all specifications, with an odds ratio of 0.44 in the main proportional odds model and 0.38 when the matching covariates are entered as controls in the outcome model. The result supports interpretation that, among frequent social media news consumers in Sweden, abandoning traditional outlets is associated with lower trust in public authorities. The conclusion of a causal pathway is limited by the cross-sectional nature of the data, the size of the treated group, and the absence of a formal sensitivity analysis for unobserved confounding.