All the News That's Fit to Tweet: The Top Social Networks for News, Ranked

We've known since at least 2018 that news consumption by Americans has taken a turn; at the time, the Pew Research Center revealed that social media provided more news to people than print journalism (a trend that’s only made things worse for print news).

Pew's newest survey on the topic, from July 2022, shows that the number of people absorbing news from social media in some way remains the same (91%, give or take). And for people who regularly use Facebook (70% of US adults), 31% also regularly use it to get the news.

That’s a slightly higher percentage than the runner-up, YouTube. It has more regular users at 82% but fewer people using it for news. Twitter stands out: Just 27% of respondents use the platform regularly, but 14% use it for news, giving it third place for news consumption. Instagram and TikTok are in 4th and 5th place, while other services drift into single digits for news reading.

A new platform included in the research this year is Nextdoor, the hyper-local social network for neighborhoods, though just 4% claim to regularly get their news there.

Taking a deeper look into the overall percentage of a social media network’s users who get their news there, Twitter is on top for 2022 at 53%, followed by Facebook at 44%.

SOCIAL MEDIA SITE BY USERS WHO REGULARLY GET NEWS THERE

The most important trend to note is that the old-guard social media networks's numbers are shrinking for audience news consumption. Instagram, TikTok, and Twitch are on the upswing.

Finally, Pew provides an interesting breakdown of the self-reported demographics of their panel of 12,147 respondents for this four-day survey. The table shows, for example, that Facebook is looked to for news by more women than men, by more users ages 30 to 49, and predominantly by white people. Men seem to prefer YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, and LinkedIn for news.

People who went to college stick with LinkedIn for headlines. Younger people (ages 18 to 29) lean heavily on Snapchat and TikTok for news. For all the social networks, more people identifying as Democrats or leaning left in their politics use them for news. (I wonder where the right-wingers go for their info; what a mystery!)

For more insights, read the full report at Pew Research.

DEMOGRAPHIC PROFILES AND PARTY IDS OF REGULAR SOCIAL MEDIA NEWS CONSUMERS

About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

Read the latest from Eric Griffith

Read full bio