Pew Research Center recently analysed Americans’ usage of the ten most popular social media sites.
For years, social platforms have been criticised for spreading disinformation and fake news. As a result, the number of US consumers who get their news from social media has declined. 48% of Americans now get their news from social networking sites at least sometimes, a 5% decline from last year.
Around 19% of Americans said they rarely get their news from social platforms, as opposed to 18% in 2020. 24% reported never getting their news from social media sites compared to 21% last year. But, Facebook dominates the social media scene, with two-thirds of all American adults using it.
Meanwhile, ByteDance-owned TikTok saw a surge in the number of users turning to the site for news – from 22% in 2020 to 29% in 2021. The study found that some social platforms are uniquely more “newsy” than others. For instance, Twitter is used by only 23% of the US population. But, more than half of its users use the platform as a news source.
[2 minute read]
