67% of Americans Use Social Media To Get Some of their News

Shan Wang, writing for Neiman Lab: Sixty-seven percent of Americans report getting some of their news via social media at some point, according to a Pew Research survey of just under 5,000 U.S. adults conducted last month and published Thursday. That overall percentage is only up slightly from 62 percent in 2016, in the run-up to the November election. But among specific demographics, using social media for news has increased: 74 percent of non-white U.S. adults now get news from social media, up from 64 percent of that group who got news that way in 2016. Fifty-five percent of Americans 50 and older say the have gotten news from social media, up from 45 percent (older people are also driving the increasing percentage of people who get news via mobile). Facebook is still the dominant social media source for news. But when Pew looked at the percentage of users on each social media platform who were using it for news, it was Twitter, Snapchat, and YouTube that saw increases (remember that user bases are vastly different sizes, from YouTube to Facebook to Tumblr to Twitter):

Comments

Is /. social media?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is /. social media?

In related news, 95% of all people are stupid

[HBI]

I imagine the other 28% probably can't read.

More seriously, the only way to gauge news today is to read a wide variety of sources and ignore the slanted ones. Deduce the slant from the verbiage, such as god-like pronouncements or emotional hot button words. It's not that hard.

It's interesting, though, that reading historical documents, one is struck by the use of emotional language in such places as Victorian-era memoirs and diaries, and in Soviet government documents. It sticks out like a sore thumb. I find that Korean to English translations also have this feature. How much we have changed. That same style of verbiage in modern English reportage would be disbelieved prima facie.