Despite several studies finding that social media is rife with misinformation and widespread consensus that foreign actors tried to use social media to influence the past two U.S. presidential elections, Americans continue to rely heavily on platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and X to get their news.
According to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center, 54 percent of U.S. adults at least sometimes get news on social media, making it a key ingredient in Americans’ news media diets. As the following chart shows, Facebook and YouTube are most often used as news sources, with 33 and 32 percent of U.S. adults regularly getting news either platform, respectively. Meta-owned Instagram ranks third at 20 percent, while TikTok and X, which have been found to be major amplifiers of misinformation, are complete the top 5.
Another Pew survey found that many Americans, particularly Republicans and young adults, now place almost as much trust in the information they find on social media as they do in the information that comes from national news organizations. The erosion of trust in traditional news media is a symptom of our increasingly polarized world, where people prefer to read and believe what their well-trained social media algorithm serves them over what might be the, often uncomfortable and complicated, truth.
