Michael Ward, Chair, ABC Alumni, provides insights into the ABC’s social media presence and the increasing significance of social media for news media.
There has been much coverage of the ABC and social media over the past eighteen months, invariably not to its benefit. Yet the increasing significance of social media to organisations like the ABC, if not as noteworthy, is important.
Media regulator, ACMA, reports that 20 million Australians use Facebook, and 7 million people use TikTok, including almost half of all 25–34 year olds and around 10 per cent of 65 to 74 year olds. Instagram is preferred by younger people: 80 per cent of 18 to 24 year olds.
Social media use is widespread and increasing, including for accessing ABC content. You may not be aware of it if getting your news and information about the ABC from other media outlets (The Guardian being an exception), but the ABC has been engaged for almost fifteen years in an increasing extension of its content delivery on social media.
This article charts the increasingly significant role of social media as a news source for Australians, focusing on its importance as a distribution mechanism for the ABC. It briefly charts the increasing significance of social media for Australians in gaining access to news and the ABC’s enormous success in finding new audiences for a range of content on social media platforms. The article also highlights some of the issues of concern that public service media organisations around the world, including the ABC, are experiencing in their engagement with these platforms. It concludes by considering some of the implications of social media use for news media organisations like the ABC and for the community.
Before turning to the ABC, here are a few overall stats on the increasing importance of social media as a news source for Australians.
This year’s University of Canberra’s Digital News Report has found that television remains the ‘general’ source of news for most Australians (57 per cent accessed news on television “last week”). However, social media is now equal second with online sources as a general source of news, being regularly used by 47 per cent of all people.
Australians’ general sources of news (2016–2025)
University of Canberra, 2025.
As the graph from the report shows, there is a remarkable diversity of sources being used by Australians to access news. It also shows radio, steady for the past five years, at 25 per cent, and newspapers actually increased for the first time in years to 20 per cent.
Podcasts (used by 9 per cent) and AI chatbots (6 per cent) were measured as news sources for the first time in 2025.
More significantly, social media is now the main news source for more than 6 million Australians. Again, drawing on the University of Canberra’s research, social media has become the second major source Australians use to access news.
Australians’ main sources of news (2016–2025)
University of Canberra, 2025.
While television remains the main news source for 37 per cent of people, social media (26 per cent) is more important than other online sources (23 per cent) and outpaces radio (7 per cent) and print (5 per cent). Incredibly (at least to me), 1 per cent of people use AI Chatbots as their main news source.
Given this increased use of social media for news, one shouldn’t be surprised that the ABC has moved over several years to deliver more news on social media. As the ABC states on its News app – “News the way you want it, when you want it”.
Nonetheless, the data on ABC news reach on social media is striking. For example, in 2023/24, ABC News on YouTube recorded over 22 million monthly views, double the figure achieved just five years earlier.
On Instagram, the ABC recorded a 15 per cent growth in followers compared to the previous year. ABC News became “the first Australian news publisher to reach 1 million followers on the platform.”
On TikTok, ABC News accounted for 345 million of “a total of 591 million video views [of ABC content] on TikTok in 2023–24”. As I was writing this article, I viewed ABC News on TikTok (abcnewsaus) with over 1 million followers, to see a story that had been shared over 10 million times (Thousands march across Australia in anti-immigration rallies). While that was an outlier, there were numerous stories in the tens and some in the hundreds of thousands of shares/views.
ABC TikTok 23 September 2025
Usage is not just for news. ABC Kids on YouTube recorded 53 per cent growth in ABC Kids channels on YouTube in a year. However, views of other ABC content increased by an even greater amount – 65 per cent, with “total views on ABC non-kids channels increase[ing] by 44% to 671.5 million.” Across a range of output, including Indigenous content launched on TikTok in July 2023, “as well as specialist accounts such as ABC Science, ABC Indigenous, ABC Arts, ABC Sport and ABC Queer”, the ABC has made social media ‘storytelling’ a major focus.
With this kind of transformation in the way people are sourcing their news, it is little wonder the ABC has adopted social media as another platform for delivery. Last year's ABC Annual Report noted the importance of using social media to “engage Australian audiences on their preferred platforms”.
The rise and threat of misinformation (false and inaccurate) and disinformation (deliberately false) is one of the most pressing issues confronting media organisations, policy makers and the community. The University of Canberra’s report devoted an entire chapter to ‘misinformation’, noting that “globally, Australians are the most concerned about misinformation (74%).” While Australians are increasingly using social media, there is also recognition of the problems and threats, with “Facebook (59%) and TikTok (57%) … seen as a major misinformation threat among social platforms.”
There is also concern about the amount of harmful and offensive content on these largely unregulated platforms, including abuse, harassment, hate speech and other online harms (racism, gender and sexuality discrimination, religious vilification, misogyny). These concerns and especially threats to young people are driving the Australian Government’s introduction of a social media ban for those under 16 years.
So, the ABC’s social media presence rationale is not simply related to the increasing number of people using social media. It’s because of these concerns that the ABC sees it important that it is delivering content on social media platforms, stating that “At a time of rising misinformation and disinformation, exacerbated by social media and, in some cases, generative AI technologies, the ABC’s role as a source of reliable and accurate news and information for all Australians has never been more important”.
This article has briefly traversed a large topic, providing some hopefully useful and important background to the ABC’s foray into social media. However, other aspects of this issue need to be considered, including the importance of existing (legacy) outputs, noting the diversity of news sources people use and the fundamental need for such diversity for a functioning democracy.
Equally challenging is the difficult relationship between public service media, other news media, and the global digital platform corporations. The shift from analogue broadcasting to digital services has meant that the delivery platforms have become economically and technologically more powerful than the media companies. Moreover, the digital platforms have built a global presence defined by a deregulatory, market-oriented celebration of consumerism as freedom and, in some cases, a contempt for public policy and the role of democratic institutions. In a future article, I will examine the impact of these issues on the role of the ABC.