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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):
Is /. social media?
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It's interesting, though, that reading historical documents, one is struck by the use of emotional language in such places as Victorian-era memoirs and diaries, and in Soviet government documents.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.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
and, of course, frequency.
5,000 people seems a bit small to actually be representative of 300,000,000 people. I would also point out that this is only representative of people that actually agree to take a survey. I'm not saying their claim is incorrect, I'm just saying one small survey shouldn't be taken as gospel.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
At least, the garbage polls for 2016 that had Hillary in the lead by 8-10 points.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Are we talking about accounts or users :)
...says another /. reader in response to a news story...
> That explains so many of the misinformed idiots I've met.
You do realize that ALL the major media outlets publish on Facebook, right?
It's not all just dank memes from The 98% and it's dopplegangers.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Wow. I remember this crap from back in the old days.
what the heck is this crazy stuff?
You must be new here.
I see people say that, and then try to talk to them to see what they know. They tend to have a great grasp of memes and basic fallacies like ad hominem and appeals to emotion, but no facts. "News" is supposed to provide you facts so that you can form an opinion. We seem to have lost that very special distinction over a pretty short time.
Just to one up your use of social media for news, I had a guy tell me all kinds of crazy stuff a particular politician said in a speech. I went and listened, it took all of 10 minutes, and said "none of that crazy stuff was in the speech." I then asked "did you listen to it?" Answer: No, I read about it on Buzzfeed, Vox, Huffpo, and watched a CNN clip and MSNBC clip on it. This person spent 2 hours gathering other people's opinions without ever hearing the actual words or reading a transcript. When I asked them to watch the speech and perhaps we can talk about the content, I was met with a firm refusal to do so.
GGP is correct, 95% of all people are stupid and refuse to do anything about it.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
It's not like we haven't all read pretty much the same thing several times from regular news sources.
There are many places on the Internet where I stick a wet finger in the air, to assess weather conditions.
Where I "get" my meteorology is from professionals over a broad spectrum (I actually prefer Chris Wallace and Shepard Smith over Joe and Mika when Chris and Shep are taking their jobs seriously). And then I often cross-check the professionals against Wikipedia (mostly for leaving important shit out) and Google Scholar (for careful treatment of what they chose to include).
Where it comes to meteorology, half of these social media bumpkins couldn't even write down the ideal gas law (though for many, it's surely Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson in a perfect storm of Hurricane Beangeflato).
For me, the continental divide—between swamp and non-swamp—is approximately George Will: I find myself on board with exactly half of what he says. David Frum is also a fairly reliable coin flip: I just never know if I'm going to agree or not, sentence by sentence.
By way of contrast, I only agree with about 1/3 of what Chomsky says, though it's a pretty important one third. From time to time I nail myself to a cross and drink his vinegar (no, I'm not self-aggrandising—this was, for the most part, a thoroughly plebeian pastime in ancient Rome).
By way of contrast again, I agree with Sam Harris 75% of the time, but it's the least important 75%, so I pretty much stopped tuning him in.
Slashdot mainly serves to keep my finger wet.
Slashdot mainly serves to keep my severed finger wet.
Doh!
Somewhere inside I just knew I was one word away from the perfect ending. I stared and stared at the video replay until I finally got it. Damn. Two beautiful bumps from Chomsky and Harris, and then I flubbed the spike.
And no, it wasn't an accident that team Chomsky, Harris and Will were lined up against Hannity, Limbaugh, and Carlson—those shrill wind-up drawls that blow nobody good—(Frum Jr. must then, perforce, be the odd-man-out stripe-swapping zebra).
You can bet team CHILL has a frostier bench—true meteorology is rarely a pleasant lark on a bark through a park (Houston, we're short of birch slabs).
Other questions for a little context: What percentage of Americans get news from the corporate media? We hear how awful the Facebook newsfeed is, but how does it compare to actual corporate media? What percentage of Americans know enough to understand whether reportage is at all accurate? ~67% relying on social media is a scary number. I just wonder whether there's scarier numbers out there.