Reddit, the American online discussion platform, has overtaken X to become the fifth most popular social media platform in the UK, according to the communications watchdog.
Ofcom said Reddit, where users post on discussion threads within topic-based communities, was visited by 22.9 million UK adults in May this year, compared with 22.1 million on X.
The figures make Reddit the fastest-growing large social media platform in the UK and represent a growth of 47% on the same period in 2023. The leap took Reddit above LinkedIn and X into fifth place on the table of UK social media platforms, which is now topped by YouTube after it overtook Facebook, reaching more than 44 million adults.
Reddit, renowned for its devoted user base who refer to one another as Redditors, appears to have been boosted by updates to Google’s search engine this year.
Farhad Divecha, the managing director of the UK-based digital marketing agency AccuraCast, said: “Google’s latest algorithm update in the first half of 2024 gave Reddit a big boost in organic search traffic. I think that has probably contributed a lot.”
Ofcom also speculated that the change may have been caused by alterations to how third-party apps accessed its content, forcing users of those apps to switch to the Reddit site. The watchdog also flagged publicity around Reddit’s stock market flotation in March this year.
The popularity of X also fell over the same period, according to Ofcom, with its reach falling by 8% since May last year. X has been criticised over content moderation standards since its takeover by Elon Musk in 2022 but it has also faced competition since July 2023 from Threads, a rival to X launched by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.
The Ofcom figures featured in the watchdog’s annual report into the nation’s digital habits, which revealed that four out of 10 UK adults say they have encountered misinformation or deepfakes, with the majority of those cases occurring online.
The misinformation survey, based on a poll of more than 4,000 UK adults, also found that three in 10 adults believe there is a single group of people who control the world together, with the same number believing there is “significant evidence” of electoral fraud in the UK.
The regulator also found that one-third of UK adults are not confident in judging whether an image or a piece of audio or video has been created by artificial intelligence.