US online discussion platform Reddit has overtaken X to become the UK's fifth most popular social media platform, according to the communications watchdog.
Reddit, where users post in discussion threads within topic-based communities, was visited by 22.9 million UK adults in May this year, compared to 22.1 million on X, Ofcom said.
This figure makes Reddit the fastest growing large scale social media platform in the UK, representing 47% growth compared to the same period in 2023. This breakthrough puts Reddit ahead of LinkedIn and X to take fifth place in the ranking of UK social media platforms. YouTube has overtaken Facebook as the top platform, reaching more than 44 million adults.
Reddit is known for its loyal user base, who refer to themselves as Redditors, and it appears to have received a boost this year due to updates to Google's search engine.
“Google's latest algorithm updates in the first half of 2024 have resulted in a significant increase in organic search traffic on Reddit,” said Farhad Divecha, managing director of Acuracast, a UK-based digital marketing agency. I think that's probably a big contributing factor. ”
Ofcom also speculated that this change may have been due to a change in the way third-party apps access their content, forcing users of those apps to switch to the Reddit site. . The watchdog also issued a warning in March over Reddit's promotion of stock market surfacing.
According to Ofcom, X's popularity has also fallen over the same period, with its reach down 8% since May last year. X has been criticized for its content moderation standards since being acquired by Elon Musk in 2022, but since July 2023 it has been a rival to X launched by Mark Zuckerberg's Meta. It also faces competition from Threads.
Ofcom's statistics feature in the UK watchdog's annual report on digital habits, with four in 10 UK adults saying they have encountered misinformation or deepfakes. It turns out that the majority of those cases occur online.
The misinformation survey of more than 4,000 UK adults found three in 10 adults believe there is a single group of people jointly ruling the world, and the same number say there is “significant evidence” of election fraud. It turned out that he believed that. In England.
The regulator also revealed that a third of UK adults are not confident in determining whether an image, audio or video has been created by artificial intelligence.
