A growing percentage of Americans are turning to social media as a news source, according to new analyses from the Pew Research Center.
The report, which explored Americans' news consumption habits in 2024, found that more than half of U.S. adults (54 percent) now claim they at least sometimes get their news from social media, up from 50 percent in 2023 and 2022 and 48 percent in 2021.
In terms of sheer numbers, Facebook and YouTube beat out other sites as places where Americans regularly get their news, with about a third of U.S. adults reporting they regularly get their news from one of these platforms (33 percent for Facebook and 32 percent for YouTube). This was followed by Instagram (20 percent), TikTok (17 percent) and X (formerly Twitter, at 12 percent). A smaller share of adults said they get their news from Reddit (eight percent), Nextdoor (five percent), Snapchat (five percent), WhatsApp (five percent), LinkedIn (four percent), Truth Social (three percent) and Rumble (two percent).
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| Percentage of U.S. adults who get their news from social sites (2020-2024) |
TikTok, in particular, has emerged as an increasingly popular news source. Among the short-form video platform’s users, more than half (52 percent) reported regularly getting their news from the site, up from 43 percent in 2022 and 22 percent in 2020, accounting for the fastest rise in news consumption among any social platform.
In total, about 17 percent of all U.S. adults now say they regularly get their news from TikTok. Last year, Pew reported that the share of U.S. adults who regularly get their news from TikTok was 14 percent, showing it had more than quadrupled as a news source from three percent in 2020.
The percentage of current social media users who claim they now get news on those sites has risen across other platforms as well, including YouTube (37 percent) and Instagram (40 percent). Facebook still commands the greatest share overall (48 percent), but that percentage has dipped in recent years, falling sex percent since 2020 (from 54 percent).
Other platforms, while commanding smaller overall audiences, are also big new sources among users. More than half (59 percent) of X users said they regularly use the platform as a news source, as do users of Donald Trump’s social platform Truth Social (57 percent). On the other hand, only 14 percent of LinkedIn users report using that site for news.
The percentage of adult social media users who get their news from these social sites typically skews young (under 50), with those under 30 mostly getting their news from TikTok (45 percent), Instagram (39 percent), Reddit (43 percent) and X (38 percent), while those ages 30-49 prefer Reddit (46 percent), Facebook (41 percent), Instagram (41 percent) and TikTok (38 percent).
Pew’s findings were based on a survey of more than 10,600 U.S. adults and was conducted between July and August. Respondents were drawn from the nonpartisan think tank’s American Trends Panel, a nationally representative list of randomly selected U.S. adults.
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