Social Media Should Be Social News
October 18, 2017
People are reading news more than ever due to easy information access on the Internet. While literacy rates soar, where people are reading news stories has changed from traditional news outlets to something comparatively newer and quite questionable. According to Pew Research, “News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2017,” people are obtaining their news stories from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others. The Pew Research survey discovered that 67% of Americans get some of their news from social media, which has grown from 62% in 2016. The growth comes from people who are older, nonwhite and are less educated. That is an interesting statistic about American social groups:
Furthermore, about three-quarters of nonwhites (74%) get news on social media sites, up from 64% in 2016. This growth means that nonwhites1 are now more likely than whites to get news while on social media. And social media news use also increased among those with less than a bachelor’s degree, up nine percentage points from 60% in 2016 to 69% in 2017. Alternatively, among those with at least a college degree, social media news use declined slightly.
The information is different from what Pew Research has recorded in the past and there are two ways to interpret the data: compare the share of each social media’s users that get news on that specific Web site and the total percentage of Americans that get news on social media sites. Twitter, Snapchat, and YouTube she a significant growth in user shared news and these directly correspond to investments the companies made to in developing their usability. Facebook remains the number one social media Web site that distributes news, while YouTube is a close second. The data also shows that users visit multiple social media sites to read the news, but that they also rely on traditional news platforms as well.
Social media is a major component to how people communicate with the world around them. Perhaps traditional news outlets should look at ways to incorporate themselves more into social media. Will Facebook, YouTube, and/or Twitter hire journalists in the future?
Whitney Grace, October 18, 2017
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