Newspaper on Smartphone (Photo : iYogi )
A new study shows that more United States adults now get their news from social media than traditional media outlets. The Pew Research Center found that a majority of US adults are getting news updates from social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. In fact, 62 percent of American adults get their news from sources such as social networks and photo/video-sharing platforms.
The new Pew study entitled "News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2016" included more than 4,600 people, according to Mashable. Other top news sources include Facebook's Instagram and Snapchat.
Facebook is the world's largest social network with 1.6 billion users and is the top go-to source of news among all social media sites. The study shows that two-thirds of US Facebook users get most of their news from the company.
This is not the first time Pew conducted this social media study. It first conducted the study in 2013.
Pew pointed out that social platforms were becoming more popular as news sources. Facebook had the largest jump from 47 percent to 66 percent.
Reddit has the biggest percentage of users that access it for news at 70 percent, but has a much smaller user base than Facebook.
Over half of Twitter's users report they use the micro-blogging service to get news. However, the figure increased slightly to 59 percent this year, which is likely due to low user growth.
The Pew study shows that a person's education level affects where they get their news. LinkedIn has the biggest percentage of college-educated users, while YouTube users have the fewest college degrees.
Meanwhile, Instagram has the most female users (65 percent). It also has the youngest audience, since 58 percent of its users are between 18 and 29 years old.
Facebook recently was criticized when former Trending Topics contractors argued the social network has been filtering out some conservative news sources. The social network denied the claim. However, it still decided to change its method of filtering Trending Topics.
In the past Facebook reported that its trending news system was almost entirely based on algorithms, according to The Washington Post. This seemed to show proof of impartiality.
Here's a video on Facebook's reporting of conservative news:
