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The Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation have just released two lengthy reports on what Americans are experiencing. news and Politics On social media. There are some interesting statistics in this study, but to me, it highlights that news distribution is in a state of disarray.
News hasn’t disappeared from X, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, but how most users engage with news content varies greatly across platforms — and much of what people say they’re watching is coming not from journalists or media organizations, but from influencers and other unaffiliated accounts.
The researchers found that most people don’t use social media to follow the news: A minority of TikTok (41%), Instagram (33%) and Facebook (37%) users said “getting news” was their “primary or secondary” reason for using the platform. As Pew points out, X is a notable exception, with 65% of people citing news as a reason for using the service.
Twitter’s long-standing reputation as a news source and Meta’s recent shift Away From the media industry: Even though the majority of Facebook, Instagram and TikTok users said they don’t seek out news, most reported consuming news on those platforms. Several The type of news-related content on the platform.
However, when we looked more closely at the types of news participants were watching, the top categories were opinion and “funny posts” about current events. See the breakdown below: Opinion and fun posts were viewed significantly more than news articles and “breaking news information” across all platforms. (Again, the only exception was X, where people said they viewed articles at roughly the same rate as “funny posts” about news.)
The sources of news-related posts reported by survey participants are also striking. On all platforms except X, the primary source of news and news-related content is not a journalist or media organization: on Facebook and Instagram it’s friends and family, and on TikTok it’s “other people.” The “other people” category is also fairly high on X, with 75% saying they get their news from these accounts. This suggests that much of the news content people see on X and TikTok is driven by these platforms’ recommendation algorithms.
Pew typically repeats the same types of surveys on a regular basis to allow readers to infer trends over time, but because this survey is quite new, unfortunately, there is no historical data to compare all these statistics to. But these statistics roughly reflect what many in the media industry have been experiencing over the past few years. Publishers have significantly pulled traffic from social media, and news is increasingly filtered through influencers, meme creators, and accounts randomly surfaced by algorithms. It is also notable that across all platforms, most people said they see inaccurate news at least “sometimes.” And in X, which represents the largest percentage of news consumers and people who watch journalistic content, 86% of participants reported seeing news that “appeared to be inaccurate.”
The report’s authors didn’t draw any conclusions about what this means overall, let alone in an election year where fears about AI spreading misinformation are on the rise, but the report suggests that finding trustworthy, accurate news on social media is far from easy.
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