Approximately forty percent of younger Americans, aged below thirty, source their news updates from social media personalities.
In a recent study, the Pew Research Center delved into the social media habits of 10,658 Americans from July 15 to August 4, 2024, examining their consumption of content from the identified 2,058 influencers across various platforms.
The study found that a significant portion of these influencers, approximately 77%, had no past affiliation with a news organization. This suggests a growing trend of personal journalists and newsfluencers, such as Fabian Grischkat and Chris Müller, who create political content targeted at younger audiences through social media in a personal and accessible manner.
Interestingly, TikTok was the only site where explicitly left-leaning influencers made up a larger percentage, at 28%. This could be attributed to TikTok's younger demographic and its focus on short, engaging videos.
The Pew Research Center defines news influencers as individuals with a large following on social media who often post about news, political, or social issues, excluding any accounts that are part of an official news organization or belong to politicians.
The study looked at 2,058 news influencers on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and X. While 85% of the influencers in the study had a presence on X, there has been a huge exodus of liberals and centrists from X after the presidential election due to concerns about far-right extremism.
The study also revealed some interesting gender trends. TikTok had the highest percentage of female influencers at 45%, while the biggest gender gap was on YouTube, where 68% of the influencers were male and 28% were female. Overall, approximately 63% of the news influencers in the study were men, while 30% were women.
The report also indicated that 21% of all adults and 37% of 18 to 29-year-olds get their news from social media influencers. This trend continues among older age groups, with 26% of 30-49-year-olds also regularly getting news from influencers. However, the numbers drop significantly for older age groups, with just 15% of Americans 50-64 saying they regularly get news from influencers, and 7% of 65+ reporting the same.
Some of the prominent influencers included in the study are Benny Johnson, Dinesh D'Souza, Matt Walsh, Jack Posobiec, Charlie Kirk, Brian Tyler Cohen, Ashley Judd, and Heather Cox Richardson.
The study also found that 27% of the influencers in the study were right-wing, according to their bios. Influencers who have worked for traditional news outlets were least likely to express an explicit political affiliation.
However, it's worth noting that there were no influencers on Bluesky, a platform that may be an interesting thing to look at a year from now if Pew repeats the study.
Lastly, the study found that 50% of the most popular influencers had a presence on Instagram, the second most popular platform for news influencers. The remainder of the platforms with significant representation of news influencers include YouTube (44%), Facebook (32%), Threads (30%), TikTok (27%), LinkedIn (12%), Rumble (11%), Telegram (7%), Truth Social (5%), Gettr (4%), Gab (4%), and BitChute (less than 1%).
This study provides valuable insights into the role of social media influencers as news sources and the demographic trends associated with their consumption. As social media continues to evolve, it will be interesting to see how these trends develop in the future.
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