Survey of 9,220 US adults: 53% get news from social media at least sometimes; 36% regularly get news from Facebook, 23% from YouTube, 15% from Twitter
Pew Research Center
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2021 Pew survey lands mid-arc in a slow erosion of social media's role as a news gateway. In 2016, Pew measured 62% of US adults getting news on social media at least sometimes, with heavy per-platform usage among Facebook users (Pew's 2016 benchmark); by 2017 it was tracking how many people spread that habit across multiple sites rather than one (multi-site news consumption rising to 26%).
The new numbers show both trends continuing: overall reach has slipped to 53%, yet Facebook still anchors regular news consumption at 36%, with YouTube at 23% and Twitter at 15%. A later Pew readout in 2023 confirms the direction of travel, with Facebook down to 30% and X to 12% (the 2023 follow-up survey).
First-order effects
Facebook enters 2021 as the default regular news source for US social media users at 36%, more than double YouTube's 23% and well ahead of Twitter's 15% despite Twitter's news-centric identity.
The 53% 'at least sometimes' figure means nearly half of US adults now sit outside social media news reach entirely, shrinking the audience platforms can sell to news publishers.
Second-order effects
With multi-site news habits already established since 2017, publishers cannot treat any single platform as their distribution base — Facebook's lead forces them to maintain YouTube and Twitter operations simultaneously.
Twitter's weak 15% regular-news share pressures its case to advertisers and publishers that it is the real-time news platform, against a rival with more than twice its regular reach.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds — and the 2023 data suggests it does — social platforms' collective grip on news distribution loosens structurally, fragmenting the gatekeeper role that Facebook consolidated in the mid-2010s.
News organizations face a durable shift from betting on one dominant referral channel to maintaining presence across several smaller ones, raising distribution costs per audience member.
The trend: Social media's role as America's news gateway peaked around 2016 and is steadily eroding and fragmenting across platforms, with Facebook's dominance fading fastest.
People who regularly get news on Facebook are more likely to be women than men (63% vs. 35%), while two-thirds of Reddit's regular news users are men. https://www.journalism.org/... https://twitter.com/...
Fascinating data on how a large portion of Americans continue to get their news from social media platforms—the surest way to tunnel vision. https://www.journalism.org/...
This tells us exactly nothing. Is there no distinction between reading The New Yorker on Twitter and reading InfoWars on Twitter? It's all just Twitter? https://twitter.com/...
Twitter, while used by just 25% of U.S. adults, sees over half of those users getting news on the site regularly. Reddit is a similar case, with 15% of Americans saying they use the platform, and 42% of those users getting news regularly on the site. https://www.journalism.org/..…
The problem is that “news from social media” doesn't only mean “articles from respectable publications posted on social media.” It means everything from “text on a coloured background written by randoms” to “disinformation written by other governments.” https://twitter.com/...
When I say we need international engagement on the matter, this is what I meant... This is exceedingly anti-democratic, in an already dire situation where the social media tax (yes, you read right) already makes accessing social media prohibitively expensive for most Ugandans. ht…
White adults make up a majority of regular news users of Facebook and Reddit, while both Black and Hispanic adults make up for about a quarter of Instagram's regular news users (22% and 27%, respectively). https://www.journalism.org/... https://twitter.com/...
Pew Research Center survey reveals a quarter of Americans who use social media for news say it makes them MORE confused about current events. Plus 59% say they expect that news to be mostly inaccurate https://www.journalism.org/... https://twitter.com/...