About four-in-ten Americans say social media is an important way of following COVID-19 vaccine news
Roughly half of Americans say that they have been getting some (30%) or a lot (18%) of news and info about COVID-19 vaccines on social media.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Roughly half of Americans say that they have been getting some (30%) or a lot (18%) of news and info about COVID-19 vaccines on social media.
While newspapers have seen steep job losses from 2008 to 2020, digital-native news organizations have seen considerable gains.
In recent years, several new options have emerged in the social media universe, many of which explicitly present themselves as alternatives to more established social media platforms. Free speech ideals and heated political themes prevail on these sites, which draw praise from their users and skepticism from other Americans.
Americans inhabited different information environments, with wide gaps in how they viewed the election and COVID-19.
Most Americans (71%) have heard of a conspiracy theory that alleges that powerful people intentionally planned the coronavirus outbreak.
About half of U.S. adults say they get news from social media “often” or “sometimes,” and this use is spread out across a number of different sites. Facebook stands out as a regular source of news for about a third of Americans.
More than eight-in-ten U.S. adults say they get news from a smartphone, computer or tablet “often” or “sometimes.”
Americans’ confidence in checking COVID-19 information aligns closely with their confidence in checking the accuracy of news stories broadly.
U.S. adults in this group are less likely to get the facts right about COVID-19 and politics and more likely to hear some unproven claims.
Here are five facts about how much Americans have heard about the QAnon conspiracy theories and their views about them.
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