No need to seek out the news. Today, we can just click around on cat videos and find it by accident.
A poll released Thursday by the Pew Research Center found that a majority of Americans (62%) now get news from social media. That includes 66% of
The math works out to about 44% of all Americans getting news from Facebook. It's a number that could scare users angered by the recent censorship controversy. In early May, a staffer accused Facebook of preventing conservative stories from appearing in the small Trending Topics section that appears to the right of the main News Feed column.
Facebook has denied it has a bias, but that hasn't stopped the conservative backlash. Liberals, too, have complained about the power that Facebook has over the news media.
Well, it turns out that that social media does have a lot of influence when it comes to how people get their news. It's not just Facebook. On Reddit and
A recent poll shows that 44% of Americans get news from Facebook. (Credit: Pew Research Center)
The poll also looked at who just stumbled on news items while doing other things online, compared to those who actively looked for it.
It turns out that a majority of Instagram, Facebook and YouTube users were passive consumers. A small majority of users of
Overall, it looks as if social media is strengthening its grip on the news business. In 2012, another poll found that only 49% of Americans found news on services such as Facebook and Twitter. Coincidentally, in a report released last year, Pew also found that newspaper ad revenue, circulation and staffing were down in 2015.
