Social Media and News Fact Sheet

Digital sources have become an important part of Americans’ news diets – with social media playing a crucial role, particularly for younger adults. Overall, just over half of U.S. adults (54%) say they at least sometimes get news from social media, up slightly compared with the last few years.

Facebook and YouTube outpace all other social media sites as places where Americans regularly get news. About a third of U.S. adults say they regularly get news on each of these two sites.

Smaller shares of Americans regularly get news on Instagram (20%), TikTok (17%) or X, formerly known as Twitter (12%). And even fewer get news on several other sites, including Reddit (8%), Nextdoor (5%), Snapchat (5%), WhatsApp (5%), LinkedIn (4%), Truth Social (3%) and Rumble (2%).

Some social media sites – despite having relatively small overall audiences – stand out as destinations for news among many of their users. For example, 59% of X users get news there, as do a similar share of users on Truth Social (57%), the site owned by former President Donald Trump. On the other hand, only 14% of LinkedIn users regularly get news on that platform.

About half of TikTok users (52%) say they regularly get news on the site, up from 43% in 2023 and just 22% in 2020. The share of users who get news also has risen on several other sites, including YouTube and Instagram.

The people who regularly get news on different social media sites often differ by gender, age, political party and other factors. For example, women make up greater portions of regular news consumers on Nextdoor (64%), TikTok (62%), Facebook (60%), Snapchat (60%) and Instagram (59%), while men make up greater shares on Reddit (68%), X (64%), Rumble (60%), Truth Social (58%) and YouTube (57%).

News consumers on Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, X and Reddit tend to be younger than those on other sites. Other patterns are unique to individual sites. For instance, 48% of news consumers on WhatsApp are Hispanic – much higher than on any other site. And LinkedIn has the largest portion of news consumers with a college degree (55%).

There also are partisan differences among those who regularly get news on some social media sites. Overwhelming shares of regular news consumers on Truth Social (88%) and Rumble (83%) are Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, as are half of those on Facebook and YouTube. On Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, Reddit and Nextdoor, news consumers are more likely to be Democrats or Democratic leaners. X news consumers are about evenly divided by party.

(Read the Appendix for data on the demographic and partisan makeup of U.S. adults who regularly get news from each social media site.)

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This fact sheet was compiled by Research Assistant Christopher St. Aubin and Research Analyst Jacob Liedke.

Read the methodology and the topline.

Pew Research Center is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts, its primary funder. This is the latest analysis in Pew Research Center’s ongoing investigation of the state of news, information and journalism in the digital age, a research program funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, with generous support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Follow these links for more in-depth analysis of news consumption on social media:

• News Platform Fact Sheet (Sept. 17, 2024)
• About half of TikTok users under 30 say they use it to keep up with politics, news (Aug. 20, 2024)
• How Americans Get News on TikTok, X, Facebook and Instagram (June 12, 2024)
• Many Americans find value in getting news on social media, but concerns about inaccuracy have risen (Feb. 7, 2024)
• 5 facts about how Americans use Facebook, two decades after its launch (Feb. 2, 2024)
• Americans are following the news less closely than they used to (Oct. 24, 2023)
• U.S. adults under 30 now trust information from social media almost as much as from national news outlets (Oct. 27, 2022)
• The Role of Alternative Social Media in the News and Information Environment (Oct. 6, 2022)
• Many Americans Get News on YouTube, Where News Organizations and Independent Producers Thrive Side by Side (Sept. 28, 2020)

Read all our reports and blog posts related to news platforms and sources.