Report finds nearly half of Americans get their news from social media | The Numbers Racket

The last full week of October in 2021 is Media Literacy Week, a national awareness campaign emphasizing the need for education on the importance of media literacy in the United States. 

To that end, the Pew Research Center asked U.S. adults where they were getting their news – nearly half (48 percent) – said social media. 

According to the Sept. 20 report, Americans “regularly” get news on social media, largely on Facebook. 

In fact, of the 66 percent of U.S. adults who said they use Facebook, 31 percent said they got their news from the social media giant. 

Among the 23 percent of U.S. adults who used Twitter, 13 percent said they regularly got their news from the site. 

Additionally, one-in-five Americans said they regularly got their news on YouTube. 

Comparing the results of the 2021 survey to 2020, the number of adults who said they regularly received their news from Facebook dropped slightly from 36 percent in 2020 to 31 percent in 2021. 

News Consumers

The survey found that demographic and party affiliation also split among different social media sites’ regular news consumers. 

For instance, 67 percent of respondents who identified as Democrats or leaning Democratic, regularly got their news from Twitter. The highest share (44 percent) of Republican respondents, or those who lean Republican, regularly got their news from Facebook. 

Reddit (67 percent), Twitter (56 percent), and Youtube (56 percent) were the three platforms where men regularly got their news, compared to TikTok (68 percent), Facebook (64 percent) and Instagram (63 percent) for women.

The majority (60 percent) of white adults said they regularly received their news from Facebook, compared with Black and Hispanic adults, who said they regularly (21 percent and 37 percent respectively) got their news from Snapchat.