TikTok is where more and more American adults get their news
Technology
As of March, 150m Americans are on TikTok
(Web Desk) - In the past three years, the percent of US adults who regularly get news from TikTok has more than quadrupled, to 14 percent, a recent Pew Research Center study found.
Even as most social media sites saw a decline in the proportion of users who consumed news on their platforms this year, 43% of TikTok users (including all age groups) reported regularly getting news on the app, up from 22% in 2020, according to a survey of conducted from Sept. 25 to Oct. 1.
A recent poll from Axios found that about 32% of adults under 30 are getting political news from the app — a statistic that may have pushed the Biden campaign to consider joining the app to boost re-election efforts among young voters.
As of March, 150 million Americans, nearly half the country's population, are on TikTok.
Of all the social media sites, the highest proportion of users on X, formerly Twitter, consume news on the platform, with 53% reporting that they regularly get news from the site.
That is down 6 percentage points from three years ago. In July, Elon Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last October, said the site had over 540 million monthly users.
Facebook saw the steepest decline in news consumption from its users. As the Meta-owned social media site seeks to distance itself from the news business, the percent of users that get news from Facebook fell to 43% this year from 54% in 2020.
On the whole, however, Facebook remains the most popular site for news.
Some 3-in-10 U.S. adults say they regularly get news on the platform, according to Pew. YouTube is in second place with 26%.
In terms of preference for social media platforms as a hub for the day's events, women and men are divided. Pew found that women tend make up a greater portion of regular news consumers on Nextdoor, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, while men tend to prefer Reddit, X and YouTube.
