Morocco
Morocco’s news environment is increasingly shaped by platforms, online video, and digital creators, as trust in news remains low and the legal environment tightly bounded. Official attempts to reshape the debate sparked by widespread protests about spending on FIFA World Cup infrastructure ahead of other priorities have resulted in a public sphere that is somewhat more active and open, but still marked by caution and constraint.
For a few weeks in autumn 2025 Morocco’s public sphere was pulled in several directions at once. Youth-led protests organised through Discord and social media about health, education, corruption, and spending priorities quickly spread. While the state was responding with arrests and prosecutions,1 Morocco’s national under-20 football team won the World Cup, and then a UN Security Council vote (Resolution 2797) on Western Sahara handed Rabat a major diplomatic success.
In response to the growing impact of the protests, Morocco’s media belatedly began a strategic opening. Official outlets gave broader visibility to concerns first articulated on social media platforms which established media had struggled to frame. This tension now defines Morocco’s information environment. Public debate is increasingly shaped less by a single media hierarchy than by a platform-first audience; Facebook and YouTube are especially important, with Instagram, WhatsApp, and TikTok also central to discovery and circulation. Official media still matter, especially for legitimacy and symbolic authority, but they no longer reliably control the pace and tone of politically sensitive conversations.
GenZ212 emerged as a decentralised youth movement that quickly turned into a national conversation with no easily identifiable leadership, relying heavily on online networks to organise and circulate its message. When ministers later addressed the protests on 2M (one of Morocco’s leading television networks) it signalled an overdue attempt to incorporate social grievances into a more manageable national narrative. A few weeks afterwards, Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita used a special 2M appearance after the adoption of Resolution 2797 to highlight the Western Sahara vote as the fruit of King Mohammed VI’s long-term diplomacy. Together, these moments suggested not a free opening of debate, but a slower process in which protest was first absorbed and then recentred within the more familiar language of sovereignty, stability, and national cohesion.
Digital-native brands such as market leader Hespress remain central to reach, while broadcast names such as Medi 1 TV, Al Aoula, SNRT News, and 2M enjoy high trust ratings. Online news use dominates, social platforms are central to discovery and circulation, and participation has picked up again (36% share news online). But trust in news overall remains low (28%), while concern about misinformation stays high (54%). Morocco’s challenge is therefore not simply a digital transition. It is the emergence of a more active yet more sceptical public, one that consumes, shares, and comments on news while remaining unconvinced by much of the wider information system. This suggests a more fragmented trust structure than a simple collapse in confidence: people express low trust in news overall, but higher trust in selected brands and in the news they personally use.
This is also helping reshape who counts as a news intermediary. In recent years, YouTube commentators, independent digital voices, and a wider creator class have become increasingly important in explaining politics, amplifying grievances, and speaking in a more direct register than traditional media often can. This includes both former journalists who have shifted to digital formats – such as the return of Taoufik Bouachrine (a high-profile journalist who had been imprisoned since 2018) via YouTube commentary – and a wider creator ecosystem that is often closer to audiences in tone and format than traditional newsrooms (such as Mustapha Swinga’s Aji Tfham YouTube channel, with more than 1m followers). These news creators are not necessarily seen as more reliable than mainstream outlets, but they are often experienced as faster, closer, and easier to understand.
At the same time, the legal environment remains tightly bounded. Reforms to the National Press Council and the professional status of journalists were presented as steps towards modernisation, but not necessarily interpreted as such.2 These changes unfolded alongside continuing judicial pressure on protest-linked speech and a broader climate in which regulation, discipline, and caution remain central to how the media field is governed.
Morocco’s media system is therefore neither opening cleanly nor closing completely. It is adapting. But adaptation is not the same as pluralism. As long as trust remains thin, institutions remain cautious, and politically sensitive debate is only selectively absorbed, Morocco’s digital public sphere will stay energetic, fragmented, and contested.
Imru AL Qays Talha Jebril
Research fellow, Moroccan Institute for Policy Analysis and Co-Managing Partner, A&K Advisors
In the online survey we ask respondents which news brands they have used to access news in the last week. These figures are based on respondents’ recall of the news sources they have used, and should be understood as survey-based measures of weekly brand reach for news.
They are not the same as web analytics, audience ratings, or other audience measurement systems (such as BARB for television in the UK). Those approaches use different methods and may measure different things. Our figures are based on what respondents tell us in an online survey about which brands they have used for news in the past week.
It is also important to note that we ask specifically about use for news. Some multi-genre broadcasters, newspapers, or other providers offer content beyond news, and the figures in our report should not be interpreted as measuring the overall audience reach for these media organisations. They refer only to respondents who say they used that brand to access news.
How do you ask about offline and online news reach?
We ask about offline and online reach separately. First, we ask respondents which brands they have used to access news offline in the last week, via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. Then we ask which brands they have used to access news online in the last week, via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of internet access.
The questions as asked in the survey are:
Which of the following brands have you used to access news offline in the last week (via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media)? Please select all that apply.
Which of the following brands have you used to access news online in the last week (via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of Internet access)? Please select all that apply.
Respondents can select more than one brand in each question. For that reason, the figures do not add up to 100%. They show the proportion of respondents who say they used each brand for news in the last week.
How do you present the weekly news reach data in the report?
On each country or market page, we present the most widely used brands in two charts: one for offline news reach and one for online news reach. The offline chart covers use via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. The online chart covers use via websites, apps, social media, and other internet-based forms of access.
The figures shown are weekly news reach: the percentage of respondents who say they used that brand for news at least once in the last week.
These figures are useful for comparing the relative news reach of different brands within each market, and for understanding how news use is distributed across offline and online sources. However, they should not be treated as market shares or measures of total time spent with a brand.
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
The brand selection is a strategic sample and not a comprehensive list of all news providers in each market. We consult with country or market experts, review prior years’ Digital News Report data, and draw on other data sources to identify the most widely used brands for news across traditional and online channels.
In some cases, where a news provider operates a number of related news brands, we aggregate these under a single heading. For example, in the UK, reach for the BBC may include use of several BBC news services across different platforms. This is done to give a clearer sense of the overall reach of major news providers, but it means that figures may not always refer to a single programme, website, app, newspaper, or channel.
Because of survey length limitations, we can only ask about a limited number of brands in each market. The charts should not be treated as exhaustive lists of every brand used for news in that market. Due to space limitations, reach charts show up to 16 of the most used brands, though we ask about more in each survey.
How should the offline and online figures be interpreted?
A respondent may use the same brand both offline and online, and may also use several different brands in the same week. For this reason, the offline and online figures should not be added together to calculate a total audience. They are best read as separate indicators of how far particular brands reach people through different forms of access.
As with other survey-based findings, small differences should be interpreted with caution. We are careful not to claim that one brand reaches more people than another, or that a brand’s reach has changed, unless the differences are large enough to be meaningful. Any year on year change of 2 percentage points or lower is not considered statistically significant.
Changing media
Online and social media are popular sources of news in Morocco with our educated and more urban sample, but broadcast and print remain important with older generations and for those who are not online.
Share news via social, messaging or email
36%
(+7)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
46%
(-)
Trust in news overall
28%
(-)
Global average: 37%
Overall trust in news is unchanged at 28%. Many Moroccans do not see news media as truly independent, avoiding sensitive subjects and mostly reflecting government views and perspectives. A number of news brands do have relatively high levels of trust, including some of the most widely used commercial (Medi 1) and state-owned outlets on TV (Al Aoula) and online (Hespress).
We ask each respondent to rate a number of popular brands (usually 15 in each country) according to how trustworthy they think each brand’s news output is. We do this on a 0-10 scale, where a score of 0 means that the respondent does not see the brand as trustworthy at all and 10 means that they see the brand as completely trustworthy – with 5 meaning ‘neither trustworthy or untrustworthy’. There is an option for those who have not heard of any particular brand to ensure that scores are based only on responses from people who are familiar with each brand.
When we come to report these scores, we add up the proportion of respondents that give a score between 6-10 and mark this as ‘trust’. We also add up the proportion that give a brand a score between 0-4 and mark this as ‘don’t trust’.
The question as asked in the survey is…
How trustworthy would you say news from the following brands is? Please use the scale below, where 0 is ‘not at all trustworthy’ and 10 is ‘completely trustworthy’.
As we make explicit throughout the report, including next to tables presenting brand-level trust findings, whether respondents consider a brand trustworthy or not is their subjective judgement. The percentage figures shown are aggregates of people’s personal opinions, they are not an objective assessment of underlying trustworthiness. We leave it to each respondent to form an opinion on whether they trust someone or something, and we field the question because we consider the resulting data to be important.
How do you present the trust data in the report?
We present the data in an alphabetised table. In the past, we presented this data as a stacked bar chart, but this led some to treat the chart as a list of the most and least trusted news brands in a given market, despite our explicit explanation this was not what the tables showed.
We present the data in a way that avoids giving small differences the appearance of great importance. In cases where there is around two percentage points difference or less between the brands, we cannot say for sure that one brand is more trusted than another. We are careful not to try to claim that one brand is more trusted than another or that trust scores have changed unless those changes are statistically significant.
Due to survey length limitations, it is important to note that we only ask about 15 of the most widely used brands. It is very likely that there are brands with lower (and higher) trust scores that we do not ask about. For that reason, we cannot say that any brand is the least (or most) trusted overall. Next to each chart we are careful to say: “Only the below brands were included in the survey. It should not be treated as a list of the most or least trusted brands as it is not exhaustive.”
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
We consult with country or market experts, draw on prior years’ Digital News Report data and other data sources to determine the most widely used brands (across traditional and online channels) when it comes to news. We also try to include ‘local newspapers’ or ‘local television’ as catch-all titles as we recognise their impact is considerable in most markets.
How representative is this 48-market survey?
The Digital News Report survey is based on an online poll but the methodology selects participants to be as representative of national populations as possible. Samples are assembled using representative quotas for age, gender, and region in every market and data is weighted to targets based on census/industry accepted data. The full methodology can be found here.
How do you try to contextualise the findings to ensure that trust scores are not taken out of context or misinterpreted?
Trust is one of a number of measures we track, including consumption of different sources, device usage, social media use, and much more. We aim to maintain consistency in our measurements year-on-year so that ratings of trust, levels of news consumption, and more, can be contextualised.
Country data is accompanied by an 800-word commentary from a media expert that aims to set the data in a wider context. We write a short commentary on the trust scores where appropriate, noting any statistically relevant changes.
RSF World Press Freedom Index
105/180
Score 50.55
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
