Slightly fewer people are getting their news from social media, thank God

Well, it’s a start. According a new report courtesy of the researchers at Pew, about a third of all Americans (that’s, let’s see here… sigh… 110 million souls) still say they get the majority of their news from Facebook, although that number has dropped a bit year-over-year. In 2020, around 36% of responders cited the House of Zuckerberg as their main information source, while that number dropped to 31% this past year.

Although 5 percentage points isn’t a whole lot to gloat about, when you factor in just how much time everyone has spent glued to their computers and phones at home over the past 18 or so months, it’s actually pretty encouraging. Pew also found that overall reliance on social media for news sources fell from 5 points, from 53% to just under 48%.

Unfortunately, that’s about where the good news ends, we suppose. A closer read at Pew’s numbers show about 13% of the Americans polled get their news from Twitter, another 11% from Instagram, and nearly a quarter educate themselves via YouTube (a terrifying thought if there ever was one).

If nothing else, the new numbers also reinforce just how integral social media has become to many Americans’ information consumption on a daily basis, and that even if these decreases continue, it will be a long time before we wean ourselves off treating the same place our high school alumni go to post photos from Cheesecake Factory as a reliable source of accurate headline news.

Until then, of course, you can always rely on us for everything you could possibly need to know about the world-at-large. C’mon. Would we ever steer you wrong? Of course not.

[via TechCrunch]

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