A new survey finds that a substantial number of Americans are regularly consuming news on social media.
The survey was conducted by the Pew Research Center between July and August of 2021.
According to the Pew data, nearly half of Americans get their news regularly from social media, while close to a third of Americans consume news on Facebook.
In the Pew survey, about 31 percent of adult respondents stated they regularly consume news on Facebook, while 66 percent say they just use the site.
The survey also found that a large portion of Twitter users regularly utilizes the platform to consume news, according to 55 percent of respondents.
“When looking at the proportion of each social media site’s users who regularly get news there, some sites stand out as being more “newsy” even if their total audience is relatively small,” the Pew report states. “Twitter, for example, is used by 23% of U.S. adults, but more than half of those users (55%) get news on the site regularly. On the other hand, YouTube, though widely used, sees a smaller portion of its users turning to the site for news regularly (30%).”
“Overall, the percentage of users of each site who regularly get news there has remained relatively stable since 2020, a year that included both a presidential election and the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the Pew authors determined.
