Pew 2017 study of news use on social media: 55% of US people aged 50+ get news on social sites, up 10% YoY; Twitter users who get news on site up 15% YoY to 74%
Context & Ripple Effects
Pew has been tracking social media's rise as a news source for years: its May 2016 benchmark put overall social-news use at 62% of US adults, with Facebook users most likely to get news there at 66%. The new 2017 study shows the growth is no longer coming from the young — the 50+ cohort jumped 10 points year-over-year to 55%, while Twitter's news share climbed 15 points to 74% of its users.
That Twitter figure stands out against Pew's own platform data: Twitter is far smaller than Facebook, yet a larger fraction of its users treat it as a news destination. Later Pew work confirms the pattern held — by late 2017, 26% of adults were getting news from two or more social sites, and a 2021 survey of 9,220 adults still found 53% getting news from social media, with Twitter at 15% regular use.
First-order effects
- News publishers and broadcasters gain an older social audience they had largely written off, expanding the addressable readership for social-distributed journalism beyond under-50 users.
- Twitter's 74% news-user share cements its position as the highest news-density major platform, sharpening its pitch to news organizations and advertisers even at smaller scale than Facebook.
Second-order effects
- Facebook faces pressure to defend its dominant but flatter news role — half its news users rely on it alone — while Twitter's concentrated news audience forces competitors to decide whether news is a core product or an incidental one.
- Media buyers shift targeting toward 50+ social users, changing which content formats and topics get funded on each platform as the demographic mix of social news consumption broadens.
Third-order effects
- If the 50+ adoption curve keeps climbing, 'social media news' stops being a youth phenomenon and becomes default news infrastructure across age groups — raising the stakes for platform accountability over what that infrastructure distributes.
- The divergence between Twitter's high news density and Facebook's high news volume points toward a split market: one platform optimized for news-native audiences, another for incidental mass reach, with publishers tailoring distribution strategy to each.
The trend: Social platforms are maturing into cross-generational news infrastructure, with Twitter over-indexing as a dedicated news venue while Facebook dominates incidental reach.