
Influx of U.S. minorities use social media for news
A 2017 survey from Pew Research Center finds that minority adults are more likely than white adults to consume news through social media platforms.
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July 17th, 2023"Nonwhite" groups in the U.S. are more and more frequently getting their news via social media.
A 2017 survey of U.S. adults from Pew Research Center finds that 74 percent of nonwhites are using social media sites to consume news, which is a 10 percent increase from 2016. (Here, the term “nonwhite” includes all ethnic and racial groups other than non-Hispanic whites.)
“This growth means that nonwhites are now more likely than whites to get news while on social media,” the report reads.
The survey also finds that three social media platforms are attracting nonwhite new users at a higher rate than white users:
Snapchat (73 percent nonwhite, 27 white)
Instagram (68 percent nonwhite, 32 percent white)
YouTube (50 percent nonwhite, 49 percent white)
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Here a handful of other highlights from the 2017 survey:
67 percent of Americans say they get their news from social media, which is a 5 percent increase from the previous year.
Showing a 10 percent increase from 2016, 55% of Americans aged 50 or older are consuming news on social media. Meanwhile, 78 percent of Americans under the age of 50 are doing the same, which presents no change from the previous year.
Individuals with less than a bachelor’s degree saw a 9 percent increase in social media news consumption, up to 69 percent in 2017 from 60 percent in 2016. During the same time period, those with a bachelor’s degree or higher used social media for the same purpose, decreasing from 68 percent to 63 percent.
According to the report, the social media platform that has seen the biggest increase in news consumption is Twitter (Trump’s preferred means of communication), growing from 59 percent in 2016 to 74 percent in 2017. Other platforms that saw significant increases are YouTube (11% increase) and Snapchat (12 percent increase).
With its massive user base (about two-thirds of American adults), Pew finds that Facebook continues to shadow the competition in terms of the number of people using the site for news. In addition, more than a quarter of Americans (26 percent) report that they use more than one social media platform for news, an 8 percent increase from 2016.
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