Technological transformation has massively migrated violence to the online ecosystem. The Shadow Report recorded 182 digital violence alerts (hacks, doxxing, artificial intelligence for smear campaigns), but the most profound change occurs in the relationship with the audience and the proliferation of biased content creators.
Daniel Desseinpresident of the Freedom of the Press and Information Commission of the Association of Argentine Journalistic Entities (Adepa), warns about this degradation of the debate.
“With respect to militant journalism, the role it played during Kirchnerism, which was encouraged, economically fed by the efforts of those years, today in Argentina that function has been replaced by militant influencers, something that is spreading. In different countries of the world, and in both cases they promote a false debate, a challenge to any thought that does not agree with their own, and that translates into an aggressiveness that threatens citizen coexistence and seriously deteriorates the climate for exchanging ideas.
By addressing the role of objectivity and these new actors in a polarized environment, Rodrigo Salazar Zimmermannexecutive director of Peruvian Press Council offers a very sharp literal reflection.
“Objectivity versus being lukewarm? I don’t think that being objective implies being lukewarm. I think that objectivity, even though many no longer talk about it, even though it may be impossible, should continue to be desirable. This implies looking for several sides of a story, not committing to one extreme. That today is seen as being lukewarm, especially because algorithms and social media platforms have accustomed us to the fact that whoever shouts the loudest and whoever exaggerates the most has a better chance of being heard…”
And the executive adds that journalism should not be activist: “Activism has a specific agenda, as we know, and the activist seeks to favor that specific agenda. In other words, the search for an agenda is at odds with the search for the truth. The streamersas we know in many cases, do not necessarily respect the desirable journalistic method of neutrality. In Peru, for example, the current presidential campaign is leaving the authorities pending to regulate the hiring of these figures as propaganda disseminators. And let us also consider that the influencers “Politicians or activists can then apply to congresses that have a lot of attendance.”
The expansion of these new actors occurs in parallel with a growing debate about the role of professional journalism in polarized societies. However, data shows that audiences still value certain traditional principles. The Digital News Report 2026 concludes that those who prefer impartial news continue to be more than twice as many as those who seek content aligned with their own ideological positions
Concern about the expansion of actors that present themselves as media without respecting journalistic standards also appears in Brazil. Marcelo Rechpresident of the National Workers Association (ANJ), warns that the growing confusion between activism and journalism constitutes a threat to the quality of information and to public trust in the media. According to the executive, numerous ideological organizations use social networks, YouTube and other digital platforms to present themselves as independent communication vehicles, eroding the relevance of professional media.
Rech says that “this mixture of activism with pseudojournalism is a serious threat to the quality of information, to trust and to everything that journalism represents, including plurality.” And he distinguishes between the journalistic method and the anomalies in the field of communication: “We have to increasingly distance ourselves, the professional vehicles of journalism, from those who are often mercenaries of information.”
The irruption of influencers and streamers does not only represent a technological change. It also modifies the forms of construction of public legitimacy.
According to the report Journalism and Technology Trends and Predictions 2026, seven in ten media executives believe that content creators are capturing time and attention that previously belonged to traditional media.
And the Reuters Institute found that 27% of users get news from creators specializing in information and that 46% receive information from some type of digital creator. Respondents especially value their closeness, authenticity and ability to explain complex topics in a simple way, although they continue to consider these actors less trustworthy and less impartial than traditional media.
Unlike journalistic media, influencers build links based on personal closeness, emotional identification and the perception of authenticity. Their relationship with audiences is usually more direct and less mediated by editorial structures. The phenomenon acquires special relevance in political communication. More and more leaders choose to grant interviews to streamers, podcasters or similar creators rather than face traditional journalistic formats characterized by cross-examination and independent verification.
The Reuters Institute warns that many political leaders seek to communicate directly with their followers through digital platforms, reducing journalistic intermediation and weakening the traditional role of the media as monitors of power.
News avoidance and the AI factor
Caught in the middle of political tension, attacks by trollsthe overabundance of information and the growing fragmentation of news consumption, many citizens choose to disconnect. In Argentina, after years of extreme polarization, interest in news fell from 77% in 2017 to just 42% in recent years, while overall trust in the media plummeted to 26%, the lowest level in the last decade.
The trend is replicated in other countries in the region. In Colombia, trust in news fell to 32%, its lowest level since the country included the Reuters Institute survey, while 59% of citizens express concern about the circulation of false information on the internet. In Brazil, where political polarization continues to condition public debate, information evasion reaches 46% of the population, above the global average and among the highest levels in Latin America.
The phenomenon is part of a broader global dynamic detected by the Digital News Report 2026: since 2021, intense interest in news fell 13 percentage points in the 48 markets analyzed, occasional or passive users grew from 16% to 25%, and average trust in news fell to 37%, the lowest level since the measurement began. At the same time, concern about misinformation increased to reach 62% of respondents globally.
As a backdrop to this fractured ecosystem stands generative artificial intelligence. Despite fears regarding the loss of human reliability or the generation of deep misinformation (deepfakes), the media try to incorporate it, in some cases reluctantly, given the scarcity of resources. The report projects significant drops in traffic from search engines as search engines evolve into systems capable of answering questions directly using AI.
Added to this scenario is the financial panic in the face of what the industry has already dubbed “Google Zero” or “Zero click.” According to the report Journalism and Technology Trends and Predictions 2026 from the Reuters Institute, Publishers expect traffic from search engines to plummet an average of 43 percent over the next three years due to the expansion of automated summaries created by artificial intelligence (so-called Answer Engines).
The visibility crisis is worsened by the proliferation of what experts call “AI Slop”: an endless volume of synthetic content and automated fake news farms. The phenomenon has escalated to such a point that, in the United States, AI-generated “zombie” local portals already outnumber real local news websites.
In it Congress of the World Association of Media and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), the president and executive editor of The New York Times, AG Sulzberger, warned that artificial intelligence companies are violating established laws and urged news organizations to defend their rights to ensure a sustainable future for journalism: “Their appropriation of public debate is made possible by the original sin that gives life to their AI products: a blatant theft of intellectual property that has occurred on an unprecedented scale.” It is a reality that media in different countries and scales suffer.
Journalism in Latin America is witnessing a harsh reconfiguration where economic asphyxiation, the judicialization of the profession, lethal violence protected by impunity and constant stigmatization sponsored by the States converge to erode the basic right to information.
The survival strategy in the face of automation seems to be returning to the human roots of the craft. According to Reuters Institute predictions for 2026, The media’s response to the threat of AI is to go for “distinction”: they will strongly prioritize original investigations and on-the-spot reporting, contextual analysis and deeply human stories, drastically reducing the production of general news that a chatbot can easily replicate. At the same time, 79% of publishers plan greater investment in video and 71% in audio and podcast formats, considering that they are narratives that are much more difficult to commodify by artificial aggregators.
Facing this “perfect storm”, as indicated by the 2025 and 2026 reports and the alarming falls in all indicators of quality and trust in the media, It will require fundamentally rethinking both the long-term financial resilience models and the unwavering defense of democratic trenches in the digital sphere..
The history of Latin American journalism has always been crossed by conflicts with political power, economic crises and technological transformations. The novelty of the current scenario is the simultaneity of all these threats: Governments question the legitimacy of the media, digital platforms redefine the distribution of information, influencers and streamers capture increasingly larger audiences, and artificial intelligence alters the rules of content production and circulation.
The survival of journalism will no longer depend solely on finding new business models. It will also require recovering something more difficult: the ability to convince societies that verified information remains an indispensable public good in the midst of digital noise.