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A new report Pew Research finds that about a third of American adults continue to receive their news regularly from Facebook, although the exact percentage has fallen from 36% in 2020 to 31% in 2021. The drop reflects a slight overall decline in the number of Americans who say they get their news from any social media platform – a percentage that has also declined by 5 percentage points year over year, from 53% in 2020 to just a little less than 48%, according to the Pew study.
By definition, “regularly” here means that survey respondents reported receiving their news “often” or “sometimes”, as opposed to “rarely”, “never” or “do not receive digital information”.
The change comes at a time when technology companies have be scrutinized for allowing disinformation to spread across their platforms, Pew notes. These criticisms intensified during the pandemic, leading to hesitation and refusals of vaccines, which in turn led to worsen health results for many Americans who have consumed the misleading information.
Despite these problems, the percentage of Americans who regularly receive their news from various social media sites has not changed too much over the past year, which shows how much of these sites are part of people’s daily habits.
Image credits: Bench search
In addition to a third of American adults who regularly receive information on Facebook, 22% report receiving regular information on YouTube. Twitter and Instagram are regular news sources for 13% and 11% of Americans, respectively.
However, many sites have seen a slight decline as a regular source of information among their own users, Pew explains. This is a different measure from the much lower percentage of American adults who use the sites for information, because it indicates how the sites’ own user bases may perceive them. In a way, it is a measure of the evolution of information consumption behaviors of often younger social media user, More precisely.
Today, 55% of Twitter users regularly receive news from its platform, up from 59% last year. Meanwhile, Reddit users’ use of the site for news has increased from 42% to 39% in 2021. YouTube has fallen from 32% to 30% and Snapchat from 19% to 16%. Instagram is pretty much the same, at 28% in 2020 to 27% in 2021.
Only one social media platform has grown as a news source during this time: TikTok.
In 2020, 22% of users of the shorthand video platform said they regularly get their news there, up from a 29% increase in 2021.
Overall, however, most of these sites have very little success with the adult population at large in the United States. Less than one in 10 Americans regularly receives their news from Reddit (7%), TikTok (6%), LinkedIn (4%), Snapchat (4%), WhatsApp (3%) or Twitch (1%).
Image credits: Bench search
There are also demographic differences between who uses which sites.
White adults tend to turn to Facebook and Reddit for the news (60% and 54%, respectively). Black and Hispanic adults make up significant proportions of regular Instagram news consumers (20% and 33%, respectively.) Young adults tend to turn to Snapchat and TikTok, while the majority of news consumers on Instagram LinkedIn have a four-year college degree.
Of course, Pew’s latest survey, conducted July 26 through August 8, 2021, is based on self-reported data. This means that people’s responses are based on how users perceive their own use of these different sites for information gathering. This may produce different results than actual measures of how often users visited sites to read the news. Some users may underestimate their usage and others may overestimate it.
People also may not fully understand the ramifications of reading news on social media, where headlines and posts are often turned into inflammatory clickbait in order to attract engagement in the form of reactions and comments. This, in turn, can encourage strong reactions – but not necessarily from those worth listening to. In recent studies by Pew, it was found that consumers of information on social media tended to be less well informed on the facts on key current topics, such as elections or Covid-19. And social media consumers were more frequently exposed to fringe conspiracies (which is pretty obvious to anyone reading the comments!)
For the current study, the complete sample size was 11,178 respondents and the margin of sampling error was plus or minus 1.4 percentage points.
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