Thailand
Legal restrictions, commercial pressure and high social media use have kept the Thai news market vulnerable to persistent flux. In 2026, key events – including an ongoing border war with Cambodia that spread disinformation across every platform, court-ordered leadership changes, and a snap February election – deepened that vulnerability further, producing a fall in news trust and leaving many Thais uncertain how much of what they saw was true.
With internet penetration exceeding 90%, Thailand’s news landscape is driven by a strong appetite for short-form video on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Facebook Reels. Television is now used by 42% for news weekly, down from 50% in 2024; only 14 of the original 24 TV channels remain, with all licences set to expire in 2029. Tero Radio Eazy FM 102.5, Bangkok’s dominant international station for 30 years, closed in 2025 despite migrating to streaming, evidence that going digital is not always sufficient in itself.
Younger Thais navigate these platforms in a distinctive way. Researchers have described how a news encounter begins with short-form video; if interest holds, longer YouTube content follows; further context comes through search.1 TikTok now reaches 55% for news, putting Thailand among the top countries in our data. However, there is a notable gender asymmetry: its audience skews significantly female while YouTube’s skews male.
Thailand is also among the world’s leading countries for creator attention (Newman et al. 2025).2 The February 2026 election and constitutional referendum saw creators such as Anuwat Noom and Pond on News, each with millions of followers, cover events in ways television journalism simply could not. While Facebook leads overall for news use at 69%, among under-25s TikTok has already overtaken it. Kan Jompalang, a citizen journalist, became a polarising nationalist figure during the border conflict – typifying a fast-moving, unregulated space.
Lèse-majesté prosecutions continued through 2025 – at least 1,986 individuals have been charged for political expression since 2014. During the February 2026 election, citizens livestreaming the ballot-box process in Chonburi flagged irregularities and this spread across social media before mainstream outlets could follow, an episode reflective of the growing role of citizen journalists in independent reporting.
Internet advertising overtook television spending for the first time in 2025, as TikTok surged 63% in ad revenue while the total market contracted3. Revenue that once sustained editorial operations now flows primarily to platform algorithms rather than newsrooms. Unable to charge readers, outlets have turned to product placement and banner advertising that now saturates every news screen – formats that sometimes erode the boundary between content and commerce and fragment the attention of audiences already habituated to scrolling past.
By 2025, all major Thai media organisations had integrated AI into their production workflows – one of the fastest adoptions in the region. Nation TV introduced AI anchor Natcha in April 2024 and Mono 29 followed with Marisa in May; Thai PBS launched its fact-checking platform ‘Verify’ in April 2025, processing scores of disinformation items during the border conflict.
While 43% sometimes or often avoid news altogether, online news participation of Thais is relatively high in the form of sharing, commenting and discussing the news – 37% say they actively shared news content in the last week.
Professor Jantima Kheokao
Asian Network for Public Opinion Research
Dhanaraj Kheokao
Potsdam University, Germany
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
Television has fallen from 50% to 42% of weekly news sources over two years as TikTok matches YouTube; social media is used by 78% of Thais and is the primary discovery route for six in ten.
Share news via social, messaging or email
37%
(-)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
43%
(+2)
Trust in news overall
47%
(-8)
Global average: 37%
Trust in news held between 50% and 55% from 2021–2025, before dropping to 47% in 2026. A border conflict that generated pervasive disinformation, general elections, and a simultaneous constitutional referendum all likely contributed to the fall. Channel 7 retains the highest brand trust score.
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
92/180
Score 53.97
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
Footnotes
1 Layered consumption pattern first observed in Thai audience research (Kheokao 2022).
2 In Thailand: 43% pay most attention to creators vs 26% for mainstream news brands (4th of 24 markets surveyed). 14 of the top 15 most-mentioned Thai individuals are men; the pattern is consistent globally (85% across all 24 countries).
3 Internet advertising overtook television for the first time in Thailand in 2025: 38.6% of total ad spend vs television’s 36.3% (MI Group). TikTok ad revenue grew 63% to 6.776bn baht, overtaking YouTube (DAAT Day, Kantar/DAAT, August 2025). Total market contracted 1.63% (MAAT/AAT; Nation Thailand, November 2025). Internet projected at 45% of total budgets for 2026 (MI Group, February 2026).