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No need to seek out the news. Today, we can just click around on cat videos and find it by accident.
A poll released Thursday by the Pew Research Center found that a majority of Americans (62%) now get news from social media. That includes 66% of Facebook FB -0.10% users — a big deal because more than two-thirds of Americans are on Facebook.
The math works out to about 44% of all Americans getting news from Facebook. It’s a number that could scare users angered by the recent censorship controversy. In early May, a staffer accused Facebook of preventing conservative stories from appearing in the small Trending Topics section that appears to the right of the main News Feed column.
Facebook has denied it has a bias, but that hasn’t stopped the conservative backlash. Liberals, too, have complained about the power that Facebook has over the news media.
Well, it turns out that that social media does have a lot of influence when it comes to how people get their news. It’s not just Facebook. On Reddit and Twitter TWTR +5.59%, 70% and 59% of users, respectively, say they use their networks to find news....
We get a lot of our news on social media. I get that even though it is largely unfiltered and would better be described as "opinion." So much is unverified, not fact-checked -- an echo chamber. Case in point -- voters, let's not assume that opinions from would-be leaders are, in fact, knowledge. We need to get our news from many more than one source of social media in my opinion.