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Study Finds Most Americans Get News from Social Media

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A new study suggests a majority of U.S. citizens now get their news from social media websites.

The Pew Research Center is an organization that researches issues and trends affecting America and the world. It surveyed 4,654 people in January and February.

Pew researchers found 62 percent of the group got their news from social media websites like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.

The new study shows Facebook to be the most popular social media website for news. More registered users of Reddit get their news from Reddit than registered users of Facebook do from Facebook. But the Pew research shows that 44 percent of all U.S. adults get news from Facebook.

Only 2 percent of all U.S. adults get news from Reddit, the study suggests.

Twitter, Tumblr and Youtube also had high numbers of registered users getting news from these websites.

But the number of people using more than one web site to get news was fairly low. Just 26 percent said they use two sites to get news and only 10 percent said they use three or more.

A total of 64 percent of people said they only use one web site to get news. Most commonly that site is Facebook.

Researchers also found news on each of the five most popular social media websites appeals to different types of people. People looking for news on Instagram are most likely to be young. Female social media users are most likely to seek news on Facebook. More people with some type of college degree look for news on LinkedIn.

Information from a total of nine social media websites was part of the study. This includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, Snapchat and Vine.

The number of visitors to all nine websites grew from a similar study conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2013.

Jeffrey Gottfried and Elisa Shearer wrote the report for Pew. They say people who use social media for news still use traditional media like television and newspapers.

Glossary

to survey (v) - to ask many people a question or a series of questions in order to gather information about what most people do or think about something

a user (n) - a person or thing that uses something

to research (v) - to collect information about or study something carefully

a trend (n) - something that is currently popular or fashionable

© 2019. Study Finds Most Americans Get Their News From Social Media for the AE ETeacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and administered by FHI 360. This work is an adaptation of Study Finds Most Americans Get Their News from Social Media by Doug Bernard and Voice of America which is in the public domain, Adapted content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, except where noted. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/