Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. Visit us at pewresearch.org
Among 11 social media sites asked about as a regular source of news, Facebook sits at the top, with about a third (36%) of Americans getting news there regularly. YouTube comes next, with 23% of U.S. adults regularly getting news there. Twitter serves as a regular news source for 15% of U.S. adults.
Entering the peak of the 2020 election season, social media platforms are firmly entrenched as a venue for Americans to process campaign news and engage in various types of social activism. But not all Americans use these platforms in similar ways.
A new analysis of U.S. adults’ Twitter behaviors finds that Democrats and Republicans have notable differences in how they use the site – from how often they tweet to the accounts they follow or mention in their own posts.
As nationwide protests continue over police brutality and the death of George Floyd, the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, which is often used in connection with police-related deaths of black Americans, has been used roughly 47.8 million times on Twitter – an average of just under 3.7 million times per day – from May 26 to June 7, according to a new analysis of publicly available tweets.
Getting news from social media is an increasingly common experience; nearly three-in-ten U.S. adults do so often.
As heated debate continues over how social media sites can improve the quality of news on their platforms while enforcing rules fairly, most Americans are pessimistic about these efforts and are highly concerned about several issues when it comes to social media and news. Majorities say that social media companies have too much control over the news on their sites, and that the role social media companies play in delivering the news on their sites results in a worse mix of news for users.
Republican and Republican-leaning adult Twitter users are more likely than Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents to follow Trump.
Among U.S. adult Twitter users with public accounts who follow Trump on Twitter, 54% approved of his job performance as of late 2018, compared with 24% among adult Twitter users who don’t follow the president.
As the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag turns 5 years old, we take a look at its evolution on Twitter and how Americans view social media’s impact on political and civic engagement.
Bots are all around us, and they can serve a number of purposes, both good and bad. But just how common are they?
In the context of ongoing debates over the role and nature of bots, Pew Research Center set out to better understand how many of the links being shared on Twitter are being promoted by bots rather than humans.
Our analysis found that an estimated two-thirds of tweeted links to popular websites are posted by automated accounts – not humans.
How do bot accounts – which automatically create tweets without direct human oversight – actually affect the mix of content on Twitter? In a new study on bots and Twitter, we found an estimated two-thirds of tweeted links to popular websites are posted by automated accounts – not human beings.
Also, read key takeaways from the study and watch a related video explaining how we identified Twitter bots.
Facebook and YouTube dominate the social media landscape. But younger Americans, especially those ages 18 to 24, stand out in using a variety of platforms like Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter. They also use these platforms more frequently than older generations.
An analysis of 9.7 million tweets about immigration, posted during the first month of Donald Trump’s presidency, reveals that news organizations played the largest role in which content was linked to compared with other information providers.
In the early days of President Donald Trump’s administration, stories that included his tweets were more likely than others to have an overall negative assessment of him or his administration and include a direct refutation by the reporter of something the president or a member of his administration said.
About two-thirds of Americans get at least some news on social media, a modest increase since 2016. Facebook still leads as a source of news for Americans, though Twitter, YouTube and Snapchat serve as sources of news for more of their users. Plus: The gap between the share of Americans who get news online and those who do so on television is narrowing.
A majority of U.S. adults – 62% – get news on social media, and 18% do so often. In 2012, based on a slightly different question, 49% of U.S. adults reported seeing news on social media.
Two-thirds of Facebook users (66%) get news on the site, nearly six-in-ten Twitter users (59%) get news on Twitter, and seven-in-ten Reddit users get news on that platform. On Tumblr, the figure sits at 31%, while for the other five social networking sites it is true of only about one-fifth or less of their user bases.
Facebook sends by far the most mobile readers to news sites of any social media site, while Twitter mobile users spend more engaged time with news content, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of audience behavior metrics from 30 news sites. This gap holds true for both longer and shorter news articles.
It’s the 10th anniversary of the first tweet on Twitter. Here’s a demographic look at the 20% of U.S. adults (23% of online adults) who use the platform.
