About half of the respondents to a new study said that they "often" or "sometimes" get news from social media, with Facebook cited as the top source.
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That is according to a Pew Research Center poll conducted Aug. 31-Sept. 7 among 9,220 adults, al part of its American Trends Panel.
A little more than a third (36%) said that they regularly get news from Facebook, followed by 23% who said they get it from YouTube and 15% from Twitter. Rounding out the top 10 social media sites that are regular sources of news were Instagram (11% of respondents), Reddit (6%), Snapchat (4%), LinkedIn (4%), TikTok (3%), WhatsApp (3%), Tumblr (1%) and Twitch (1%).
But for all that social media news grazing, less than a third (29%) said that the news they got there helped them better understand current events, while almost a quarter (23%) say it has actually made them more confused by current events.
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Some sites are newsier than others. For example, says Pew, while 25% of adults use Twitter, over half of those (59%) said they are getting news regularly from the site, while less than a third (32%) of the 74% who are regular YouTube users said they get news from the site.
The margin of error on the survey is plus or minus 1.7 percentage points.
