Hammad Khalid
We saw a significant increase in social media usage during the worldwide pandemic, when digital gadgets encountered a massive supply chain delays due to a global chip shortage.
A recent research provides detailed statistics on what percent of the US population acquire news from leading social media networks.
According to a new Pew Research Center study, over half of US people obtain their news from social networking sites “sometimes” or “frequent.” Though this figure (48%) is significantly lower than the previous year, it may raise concern given social media’s sensitivity to disinformation.
Pew’s new research, released on Monday, has a few intriguing findings. Facebook is the leading competitor, with 31% of US social-media users questioned indicating they obtain news from Facebook on a daily basis. YouTube comes in second with 22% and Twitter comes in third with 13%. According to Pew, Twitter, on the other hand, is perceived as more newsworthy than the other two platforms. If you only look at Twitter users (rather than all US adults), 55 percent say they obtain news from the social media site on a regular basis.
According to Pew, “fewer than one in ten Americans say they often get news via Reddit (7 percent), TikTok (6 percent), LinkedIn (4 percent), Snapchat (4 percent), WhatsApp (3 percent), and Twitch (1 percent).”
In terms of demographics, those who often use social media for news are mostly white. More over half of frequent news consumers on Facebook (60%), Twitter (51%), and Reddit (54%) are white, with Twitter (46%) and LinkedIn (45%) trailing closely behind.
According to Pew, the number of Hispanic users who frequently obtain news from more visually oriented platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram approaches or, in the case of Snapchat, exceeds the percentage of white users. Snapchat and TikTok news users are younger than those on other social media platforms, with 63 percent and 52 percent in the 18-29 age group, respectively.
Source: CNET\
It’s easy to spread fake news with just a few clickbaits, but this statistical data provided by CNET and gathered by Pew is far more accurate. Nowadays, every social platform is being bashed by different conspiracy theorists.
Before reading any news, make sure to fact-check, We have read new from Mr. Biden saying Facebook is killing people with Covid-19 misinformation and right after a few days, he took a u-turn saying “Facebook isn’t killing people“.
These findings highlight the significance of fact-checking on social media sites: With nearly half of American people using social media for daily news consumption, misinformation is extremely easy to spread.
The Pew research was based on web surveys performed in July and August, with responses from over 11,000 people who were part of a “nationally representative panel of randomly chosen US adults.”
