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The president of El Salvador gets it. Addressing members of the United Nations (U.N.) in September 2019, President Nayib Bukele paused for a selfie. "Believe me, many more people will see that selfie once I share it than will listen to this speech," he said. "I hope I took a good one."

Marianne Williamson, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate in the United States, also gets it. Asked after a debate whether it went well, she replied that she would only know for sure "when I see the memes." So does Andrew Yang, another Democratic candidate. His first big interview was with Joe Rogan, a comedian with 6.96 million subscribers on YouTube. After it was viewed 1 million times over the course of two days, Mr. Yang wrote that his campaign could be divided into "br (Before Rogan) and ar (After Rogan)."

These politicians illustrate how teenagers and those in their early 20s consume news today. It's almost entirely on social media. It's almost entirely visual. The content of the news — "President Makes Speech at U.N." — is often filtered through humor or comments about an event. Or, just as often, it's mediated by personalities who command huge followings among young people.

Worldwide Trend
These principles hold true around the world. Between 2009 and 2018, the share of teenagers who read newspapers declined from around 60 percent to around 20 percent, according to the Programme for International Student Assessment, a worldwide study of student literacy. Young Indians are half as likely to visit timesofindia.com, India's biggest English-language news site, as older ones. They are also far more interested in videos and Bollywood news. In Great Britain, younger teens are far less familiar with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) news service than with YouTube or Netflix.

Roughly 80 percent of Arabs ages 18 to 24 now get their news from social media, up from 25 percent in 2015. Two-thirds of South Korean teenagers go online to find out what is happening in the world. A study of American and British teens by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in Oxford, England, argues that when it comes to news, young people are most concerned with "what it can do for them as individuals — rather than society as a whole."

Strength In Numbers
It can be tempting to dismiss teenagers' news habits. Most cannot vote and have limited money.

Still, a third of the world's population is younger than 20 years old. More than half the world is connected to the internet. Common Sense, an American non-profit group, found in a recent study that screen time for American teens is nearly seven and a half hours per day.

For media businesses, young people's habits drive billion-dollar decisions, such as Facebook's purchase of Instagram in 2012 and its failed attempt to buy Snapchat the following year.

How News Is Consumed By Teens Influences Countries And Businesses
Teenagers understand that technology gives them power. Greta Thunberg, the teenage activist from Sweden, started the global "school strike for climate" in which protests by students have spread to 150 countries. How news is made, spread and consumed by teenagers will determine what happens to their countries and businesses. As one 13-year-old told Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an American lawmaker, "I'm not old enough to vote yet, but I can follow you on Instagram!"

To best understand this future, look to America. It has the world's most vibrant media ecosystem and is home to most of the platforms used by youth around the world, including Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat. American media has influence around the world and is widely copied. A meme that starts there has a good chance of spreading worldwide.

The arena for those memes has changed, though. Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook has come under intense criticism for its news distribution. For many American teenagers, the social network is uncool. It's for old people. Nor do many teenagers hang out on Twitter, which plays an outsized role in journalism and politics only because it is full of journalists and politicians, including U.S. President Donald Trump.

Instagram, WhatsApp And YouTube
The action has shifted to Instagram (owned by Facebook), WhatsApp (also owned by Facebook) and YouTube (owned by Google), each of which has more than a billion users. Pew Research Center reports that 85 percent of American teenagers use YouTube. More than 70 percent of American teens use Instagram.

The introduction of Instagram "Stories" in 2016 allowed users to post short-lived images with added text to a largely visual platform, made sharing and reposting easier and supercharged its growth. Stories also allow those with more than 10,000 followers to share links to other material. Where users went, so did those who hope to influence them: advertisers, marketers, politicians and miscellaneous mischief-makers have all piled into Instagram.

Consider the Amazon rain forest. By late August 2019, anyone with an Instagram account would have known "the Amazon rain forest — the lungs which produce 20 of our planet's oxygen — is on fire," as Emmanuel Macron, France's president, wrote in an August 22 post liked by nearly 200,000 people. On the same day National Geographic's account, the 11th-most followed on Instagram with 126 million followers, posted about fires in the Amazon, as did Leonardo DiCaprio, an American actor with 38 million followers, and Malaika Arora, an Indian model, with 10 million followers.

Motives And Fairness
These news sources can cause worry. YouTubers and Instagram personalities have no journalism code of conduct, are uninterested in traditional practices of fairness, and their motives are not necessarily influenced by notions of public benefit.

Governments and institutions cannot simply wish social media away. Indeed, some feel they have little choice but to join in. In his speech to the U.N., President Bukele said: "Although we might not want to accept it and we might kick against it, the internet is increasingly becoming the real world."

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This is a satirical website. Don't take it Seriously. It's a joke.