All the News That's Fit to Tweet: The Top Social Networks for News, Ranked
We've known since at least 2018 that news consumption by Americans has taken a turn; at the time, the Pew Research Center revealed that social media provided more news to people than print journalism (a trend that’s only made things worse for print news(Opens in a new window)).
Pew's newest survey on the topic, from July 2022, shows that the number of people absorbing news from social media in some way remains the same (91%, give or take). And for people who regularly use Facebook (70% of US adults), 31% also regularly use it to get the news.
That’s a slightly higher percentage than the runner-up, YouTube. It has more regular users at 82% but fewer people using it for news. Twitter stands out: Just 27% of respondents use the platform regularly, but 14% use it for news, giving it third place for news consumption. Instagram and TikTok are in 4th and 5th place, while other services drift into single digits for news reading.
A new platform included in the research this year is Nextdoor, the hyper-local social network for neighborhoods, though just 4% claim to regularly get their news there.
Taking a deeper look into the overall percentage of a social media network’s users who get their news there, Twitter is on top for 2022 at 53%, followed by Facebook at 44%.
The most important trend to note is that the old-guard social media networks's numbers are shrinking for audience news consumption. Instagram, TikTok, and Twitch are on the upswing.
Finally, Pew provides an interesting breakdown of the self-reported demographics of their panel of 12,147 respondents(Opens in a new window) for this four-day survey. The table shows, for example, that Facebook is looked to for news by more women than men, by more users ages 30 to 49, and
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