Growth of Social Media as a News Source Stalls - Rob Horowitz
Tuesday, September 27, 2022
Social media remains an important source of news and information for Americans, but its growth as a place people go to for news has stalled. Today “half of US adults get news at least sometimes from social media,” according to a new Pew Research Center national survey. The share of the American public that uses social media as a source of news, however, has stayed about the same over the past three years, Pew reports. This follows a period of rapid growth.
Facebook remains the leader among social media sites as a source of news for American adults. “Nearly 1-in-3(31%) “say they regularly get news from Facebook,” according to Pew. Facebook is the number 1 source for news in large measure because it leads all the other social media sites, except for YouTube, in the number of its domestic users. Seven out of ten Americans are Facebook users.
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“A quarter of U.S. adults regularly get news from YouTube, while smaller shares get news from Twitter (14%), Instagram (13%), TikTok (10%) or Reddit (8%), wrote Pew in its poll summary. “Fewer Americans regularly get news from LinkedIn (4%), Snapchat (4%), Nextdoor (4%), WhatsApp (3%) or Twitch (1).”
As social media matures as an industry, like most maturing industries, its overall growth has slowed. However, TikTok and Instagram, which attract a disproportionate share of younger adults, continue to gain users. TikTok continues to rapidly gain users with 3-in-10 American adults now going to the site and Instagram’s steady growth persists with nearly half of American adults employing it. On both these sites, about half of young adults, ages 18 to 29, who are users, get news at least occasionally when they visit.
It is the case that some of the plateauing of social media as a source for news is a result of a general slowing in the growth of the use of social media generally. But that is only part of the story. The increased awareness of the amount of disinformation and misinformation available on and spread through social media has resulted in social media becoming a less trusted source of news than other media platforms. This distrust is a major reason for the curbing of social media’s growth as a source for news.
A new Reuters Institute study finds that the “levels of trust in news on social media, search engines, and messaging apps is consistently lower than audience trust in information in the news media more generally.” This is particularly the case for news about politics for which Americans as well as people in the three other nations surveyed, find social media a “suspect" source and too often a place of "contentious political conversation" that they evidently prefer to avoid, according to the study.
Not surprisingly, people who don’t use social media platforms to get news or don’t use them at all are substantially less trusting of news found on these platforms than people who go to them regularly for news,
For social media sites to produce robust growth once again in the number of people accessing news on their platforms, they must restore trust in the reliability of the information they provide. That will require doing much more to combat the disinformation and misinformation that still runs rampant. This would not only be good for social media companies' bottom lines; it would be an invaluable service to our democracy.
Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits, businesses, and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.
