Content creators are rapidly becoming dominant forces in political news, often eclipsing traditional media outlets like print, TV, and digital platforms to shape public opinion and political narratives. While these creators excel at making complex issues accessible to audiences in relatable ways, their rise raises critical questions regarding reliability and the spread of misinformation in democracies.
To better understand this phenomenon, YouGov European Political Monthly – a monthly survey conducted in France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain – investigated whether content creators should be held to the same standards as traditional journalists, how public trust is divided among them, and whether EU institutions should collaborate with creators to expand their reach.
Key findings
Political content creators are popular, distrusted and almost universally seen as fair game for regulation, all at the same time. Beneath that broad agreement, the data splits sharply by country and by party, in ways that matter for anyone planning a communications strategy around creators.
Six patterns run through the data:
- Regulatory appetite is real but tiered by target, not by audience size. In every country, people are readiest to regulate political parties' online content, then mainstream journalists, then independent individuals, but they resist the idea of treating creators with large followings versus creators with low followings differently.
- The EU-versus-national regulator question tracks Euroscepticism almost exactly. Support for EU-wide rules ranges from 31% in Poland to 59% in Spain, and within countries it splits hard by party (Poland's PiS sits at 13%; the pro-EU Democratic Party in Italy sits at 74%).
- There's a legitimacy gap. A majority in every country say independent creators cannot be called journalists, yet a third or more expect creators to take on a bigger role in political information over the next five years and almost nobody expects a smaller one.
- Trust in creators is not the story people expect. Averaged across the five countries, independent creators are trusted roughly on a par with national government and ahead of commercial news organisations on EU policy issues - though Poland and Spain sit at opposite ends of the range, and in Spain, VOX voters trust independent creators far more than they trust the mainstream commercial press.
- Reach and trust move together in most countries, but not everywhere and not for the same reason. In Poland, Germany and France, the reach of and trust in political content creators track each other closely. Italy and Spain are the exceptions, and they break in opposite directions. Italy has the lowest reach of any country (13% get most news from creators) but higher trust than that would predict (35%, third-highest of five). Spain sits in the middle on reach (16%) but has the lowest trust anywhere (27%). Reach alone doesn't tell you whether people will actually believe the message.
- Age is the strongest predictor of how much people use and value creators, but not of whether they trust them. Under-35s consume far more creator content and are far more willing to call creators journalists than over-55s, in most countries. But trust doesn't follow the same pattern, Poland's under-35s are the clearest case: the heaviest users of creator content of any age group, anywhere (40%), yet less trusting of it (37%) than their own grandparents' generation (57%).
Section 1: Who should regulate political content creators, and how?
Respondents in all five countries were asked whether political content shared online by three different groups – political parties, mainstream journalists and independent individuals with no organisational affiliation – should be regulated. The order of appetite is consistent everywhere: parties draw the most support for regulation, independent individuals the least, with journalists in between.
France and Spain show the strongest overall appetite for regulation across all three groups (including 72%-74% for parties), while Germany is the most permissive country by a clear margin (52% for parties, 39% for independent individuals). Even so, the shape of the pattern – parties > journalists > individuals – holds in every country, suggesting the public draws a consistent line between organised political actors and individual voices, regardless of national context.
When people do want regulation, where should it come from?
Europeans who said at least one of the three groups should be regulated were asked a follow-up: should those rules be set by national governments or by the EU? This is where the five-country consensus breaks down completely.
Leaning towards EU-level rules are Spain (59%) and Germany (52%), while leaning more towards national regulation are Poland (58%) and France (49%). Italy sits closer to even, with 50% picking the EU and 43% national. That range – 28 points between the most and least EU-favourable countries – is wide enough that a single pan-European messaging line on “who regulates creators” would land very differently in Warsaw than in Madrid.
The EU-versus-national split tracks party position on European integration closely. In Poland, only 13% of Law and Justice/United Right (PiS) voters want EU-wide rules, against 46% of Civic Coalition (KO) voters. In Italy, 74% of Democratic Party (PD) voters want EU rules, against 35% of Brothers of Italy (FdI) voters. In France, Macron-aligned voters back EU rules by 49% to Le Pen-aligned voters' 25%.
Regulatory appetite moves only modestly with age, nothing like the 20-40 point swings for party affiliation. Support for regulating parties' content is fairly flat by age in every country (Germany: 52% among both 18-34s and over-55s), and where there is a gap it runs in the expected direction – older adults are somewhat more supportive of regulating independent individuals (e.g. Italy: 48% of 18–34s vs. 62% of over-55s; France: 46% vs. 56%). Even the age group that consumes the most creator content and grants it the most legitimacy (see Sections 2 and 4) still backs regulating parties' content by 52%-71% across countries. The desire for guardrails looks close to generation-proof, even where views on creators' legitimacy are not.
Size-based regulation has little public support
Across all five countries, a majority reject the idea of tiering regulation by audience size. Roughly six in ten adults say that all political content creators should face the same rules “regardless of audience size” – ranging narrowly from 59% (Italy) to 65% (France). Only 11%-18% think creators with larger audiences should face tougher rules, and almost nobody (1%-4%) wants the reverse.
Section 2: Are creators seen as journalists and does the public expect that to change?
Respondents were asked whether individual people who produce political content online, without organisational affiliation, can be described as journalists. In every country, a majority say they cannot, from 51% in Poland to 66% in France and Spain. Only 14%-23% say they can.
At the same time, when asked to look five years ahead, an average of a third of respondents in every country expect creators to play a bigger role in how they get political information than they do today, and almost none expect a smaller one.
The gap between these two figures is the headline: on a five-country average, 59% say creators cannot be called journalists, while 33% expect creators to take on a bigger role in five years. Legitimacy, in other words, has not caught up with anticipated influence in any of the five countries.
Willingness to call creators "journalists" splits by party, but the more important number is the baseline: a plurality say creators cannot be called journalists in every single party tested, including the two most permissive ones.
In Germany, AfD voters are the most willing to extend journalistic status (33%), but 50% of AfD voters still say creators cannot be called journalists. In Spain, VOX voters are the most willing of any Spanish party (37%), but 45% still say creators cannot be journalists.
These figures compare to 23% for the SPD and 20% for the CDU/CSU willing to describe content creators as journalists in Germany, and to 23% for PP, 12% for SUMAR and 11% for PSOE in Spain.
Age is the sharpest divide in this section
Where party affiliation shapes who extends legitimacy to creators, age shapes it more consistently and, in most countries, more dramatically. In most countries, under-35s are two to three times as likely as over-55s to say creators can be described as journalists, and consistently more likely to expect their role to grow.
Age correlates with views on legitimacy, though the picture is more measured than a simple divide. In most countries, under-35s are more likely than over-55s to say creators can be described as journalists, but even among under-35s, a majority says creators cannot be called journalists.
The one genuine exception is Germany, where under-35s are split almost exactly evenly (39% can, 38% cannot), the only age group in this entire survey where "can" is not clearly outnumbered by "cannot." Italy breaks the pattern differently: under-35s are no more willing than over-55s to grant creators journalist status (14% vs. 15%). Age moves the numbers, in other words, but it doesn't flip the underlying verdict; except, narrowly, in one country. Under-35s are consistently more likely than over-55s to expect creators' role to grow over the next five years, in every country without exception.
Section 3: Where does public trust actually sit?
The survey asked respondents how much they trust seven different types of source on EU policy issues. Averaged across the five countries, the order runs: academic and research institutions (57%), national public broadcasters (43%), EU institutions directly (42%), independent online creators/journalists (36%), national government (34%), and commercial news organisations, which comes in lowest of all seven sources tested at 25%.
Two things stand out. First, in every country tested, independent creators are trusted more than commercial news organisations – the closest proxy here to traditional, for-profit mainstream media – though by very different margins. The gap is negligible in Germany (36% vs. 35%, a 1-point difference) but real everywhere else, running from 8–9 points in Spain and France up to 15–22 points in Italy and Poland.
Second, Poland is a genuine outlier on the underlying trust level, not just the gap: independent creators there are trusted more (50%) than the country's own national government (31%), and more than in any other country by a wide margin.
Trust splits harder by party than by country
The country-level averages mask sharper divides once the data is cut by party. The clearest example is Spain, where VOX voters trust independent creators (41%) far more than they trust national government (9%) or commercial news (17%), though even VOX voters trust academic institutions (49%) more than they trust creators.
VOX voters are, however, the exception rather than the rule in Spain, with 41% who trust independent creators comfortably ahead of PSOE (30%), PP (25%) and SUMAR (24%) voters. For a party whose voters are otherwise the most distrustful of institutions tested, independent creators are a clear exception – a pattern that matches VOX's own communications strategy, which has leaned heavily on creator-style, direct-to-camera content rather than traditional press.
In other countries, the gap is much narrower. In Poland, for instance, voters trust creators broadly, across the political spectrum. The three Polish parties large enough to examine for this study – PiS (53%), KO (56%) and Third Way (59%) – trust independent creators well above the five-country average of 33%, with only a six-point spread between them.
Age divides trust in creators more than party does – in most countries
Section 2 showed under-35s are consistently more willing to call creators journalists. Trust is where that consistency breaks down: age tracks trust closely in some countries and not at all, or even in reverse, in others.
In France, Germany and Poland, age divides trust in creators more than party affiliation does – the reverse of what the regulation and legitimacy sections would predict. Poland is the sharpest case, and it runs backwards from what reach alone would suggest: under-35s have by far the highest reach through creators of any age group in this survey (see Section 4), yet trust creators less (37%) than over-55s do (57%).
Spain is the one country where the opposite holds – party (a 17 point spread, driven by VOX) divides creator trust more sharply than age does (a four point gap). Neither pattern is visible from the national topline alone; both only appear once the same figure is cut two different ways.
Section 4: What does this mean for institutional and campaign communication?
Europeans were asked to choose between two statements: that EU institutions should prioritise maximising reach, even via independent content creators and with less control over the message, or that EU institutions should prioritise keeping total control of the message, even if that means not using independent creators to extend reach.
Only two of five countries show a clear preference for message control over reach: Spain (45% control vs. 31% reach, a 14-point gap) and France (36% vs. 26%, a 10-point gap). Poland is the one country that clearly favours reach through creators instead (39% vs. 25%, a 14-point gap the other way). Germany (32% vs. 31%) and Italy (33% vs. 32%) are effectively tied. This lines up with the earlier finding that Poland trusts independent creators more, and more consistently across parties, than any other country tested. Where trust in creators is highest, appetite for using them as an institutional reach strategy is also highest – which suggests the “reach versus control” choice is not a fixed communications-doctrine question but one that should be calibrated country by country.
How people currently get their information matters too
Across the five countries, an average of 44% say they get most of their daily news from mainstream media, against 18% who say they get most from independent creators, and 22% who describe a balance of the two. Poland again stands apart: 26% say they get most news from creators, the highest share among the five countries.
Under-35s are more supportive of a reach-first approach than the whole-population figure in every single country. The gap is consistent whether the national result already favours reach (Poland) or firmly favours control (Spain, France).
Read alongside the reach data above – under-35s get most of their news from creators at two to three times the rate of over-55s in every country – a “control-first” institutional strategy that looks safe on today's whole-population numbers may be building in a gap with the youngest segment of its audience, one that would only widen as that cohort ages into a larger share of the electorate.
Section 5: The placement problem: reconciling reach and trust
Reuters Institute data establishes that creators command real attention and, in some countries, rival mainstream media for reach. Read on its own, that finding invites a simple conclusion: if an audience lives on TikTok or YouTube, put the message there. YouGov's data complicates that conclusion in a specific, measurable way. Pairing how many people say they get most of their daily news from independent creators (a reach proxy) against how many people say they trust those same creators shows the two figures do not move together.
Poland, Germany and France are the three countries where reach and trust actually move together: Poland ranks highest on both (26% reach, 50% trust), Germany ranks second on both (20% reach, 36% trust), and France sits roughly mid-table on both (14% reach, 33% trust).
The two exceptions run in opposite directions. Italy has the lowest reach of any country (13%) but higher trust than that would predict (35%, third highest of five), trust outpacing reach. Spain sits mid-table on reach (16%, third of five) but has the lowest trust anywhere (27%), trust lagging well behind reach. Poland's position at the top of both measures is also why the earlier data (Section 4) shows the public there backing a reach-first EU communications approach: reach and trust reinforce each other there in a way they don't in the other four countries.
The exception: audience-level targeting can find pockets where reach and trust align
The national picture is not the only picture. Even in countries where reach and trust diverge overall, specific party audiences show both figures moving together – and these are the clearest evidence in the dataset that “go to the creator” is sometimes exactly the right call, provided it is targeted rather than blanket.
- AfD voters in Germany get most of their news from creators at a higher rate than the national rate (30% vs. 20%) and trust creators (41%) second only to SPD voters (44%, against a 36% national average). For this specific audience, both dials point the same way.
- VOX voters in Spain combine the highest reach through creators of any Spanish party (21%, against 16% nationally) with by far the highest trust (41%, against 27% nationally and as low as 24% for SUMAR voters). Spain's low national trust average conceals a segment where creators are clearly the right channel.
- Third Way voters in Poland post the highest combination of reach (31%) and trust (59%) of any party subgroup in the dataset – the closest thing in this data to a “safe bet” for creator-led outreach.
All three of these aligned cases sit on parties usually associated with lower institutional trust generally – which suggests creators are filling a specific vacuum for audiences already inclined to distrust national government and commercial media, rather than displacing a trusted mainstream option. That has a direct implication for targeting: the audiences where creator-led placement works best are unlikely to be reached effectively by a parallel institutional or mainstream-media campaign, which argues for genuinely separate strategies rather than a single message pushed through every channel.
The same mismatch shows up by age – and Poland's under-35s are the sharpest case in the dataset
The party-level exceptions above are all “aligned” cases: reach and trust rising together for a specific audience. Cutting the same reach/trust pairing by age instead of party surfaces the opposite pattern in one country, and it is the starkest reach/trust mismatch anywhere in this survey.
Poland's under-35s report the highest reach through independent creators of any age group in any country tested (40% say creators are their main news source) – more than double their own mainstream-media figure (20%). Yet the same group trusts creators at only 37%, below the Polish national average (50%) and well below Polish over-55s (57%), who consume far less creator content but trust it more when they do.
France and Germany show the opposite pattern: reach and trust both run higher among the young (France 45% trust among 18–34s vs. 26% among over-55s; Germany 46% vs. 33%), so exposure and conviction move together. Poland's young cohort is the one case in this dataset that looks like exposure without earned trust – the single clearest argument, of everything in this report, for testing message credibility with an audience before assuming its attention can be converted into influence.
Conclusion
Across France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain, political content creators occupy an unsettled position: widely consumed, broadly seen as fair targets for regulation, generally not considered journalists, and expected, almost everywhere, to matter more in five years than they do today. None of the five questions this briefing set out to answer has a single European answer. Regulatory appetite, the preferred level of regulation, trust in creators relative to institutions and media, appetite for using creators as an institutional reach strategy, and the relationship between reach and trust itself all vary by country, and often vary just as sharply within a country by party.
For a panel audience working across borders, the practical takeaway is less “what does Europe think” and more “which of these five pictures looks like the country you're planning for.” Poland's pattern – high trust in creators across parties, and the only country where reach beats control – is close to an outlier case rather than a preview of where other countries are heading; Spain's VOX finding shows that even within one country, a single party's voters can hold a strikingly different view of creators than their compatriots. Both are reasons to treat “creator strategy” as a country-specific design question, not a continent-wide one. And the reach-versus-trust decoupling in Section 5 is the clearest single argument in this dataset for testing message credibility on a platform before committing a campaign to it, rather than assuming reach and trust travel together.
*Note on Alliance 90/The Greens (Germany): this subgroup falls just under the threshold in the content-creators survey (n=98) but clears it in the EU political communication survey (n=100), so Green-voter figures appear in Section 5 and Section 6 of this briefing but not in Section 3 or Section 4.