A diagram on social media, Credit: Brian Solis and JESS3/Wikimedia Commons
Twitter, You Tube and Snapchat have seen a increase in the share of people who get news on the website but Facebook remains the biggest social media site as source of news, according to a Pew Research Center analysis.
About two-thirds of Americans (66%) use Facebook, and a majority of those users get news on the site, similar to 2016, a report said Thursday, reflecting that of all U.S. adults, 45% of Americans get news on Facebook.
Due partly to President Donald Trump’s use of Twitter as a site for his policy announcements and reactions to developments, the social media site has seen a jump in the percentage of users getting news from the platform.
According to Pew Center, since 2013, at least half of Twitter users have reported getting news on the site, but in 2017, with a president who frequently makes announcements on the platform, that share has increased to about three-quarters (74%), up 15 percentage points from last year.
As for YouTube, about a third of users now get news there (32%), up from 21% in 2016.
Among Snapchat’s users, the share of audience getting news has increased 12 percentage points to 29% in August 2017, up from 17% in early 2016.
The four major social media platforms, have markedly different audiences.
The Pew data show that two-thirds (67%) of Americans report that they get at least some of their news on social media as of August 2017– with two-in-ten doing so often.
The latest figures mark a “modest” increase since early 2016, when (during the height of the presidential primaries) 62% of U.S. adults reported getting news from social media, according to the the study based on a survey conducted August 8-21, 2017.
The analysis finds that it is for the first time in its history of surveys that more than half (55%) of Americans ages 50 or older report getting news on social media sites, indicating a 10 percentage points higher than the 45% who said so in 2016.
While those under 50, are more likely than their elders to get news from these sites (78%, an unchanged share from 2016).
