More Americans now say government should take steps to restrict false information online than in 2018
48% of US adults say the government should restrict false information online, even if it means losing some freedom to access/publish content.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
48% of US adults say the government should restrict false information online, even if it means losing some freedom to access/publish content.
About half (48%) of U.S. adults say they get news from social media “often” or “sometimes,” a 5 percentage point decline compared with 2020. More than half of Twitter users get news on the site regularly.
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.
Here is how the average adult Twitter user in the U.S. tweeted about the news in 2021, as well as how these patterns have changed since 2015.
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.
A new study of posts on popular public Facebook pages about the early days of the Biden administration finds that the focus of these posts, as well as the assessments of the new president, differed widely by the ideological orientation of the pages.
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.”
A plurality of experts think sweeping societal change will make life worse for most people. Still, a portion believe things will be better in a ‘tele-everything’ world.
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