News Influencers Fact Sheet
About one-in-five U.S. adults say they regularly get news from news influencers on social media, and this is especially common among younger adults.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Research Analyst
Naomi Forman-Katz is a research analyst focusing on news and information research at Pew Research Center.
About one-in-five U.S. adults say they regularly get news from news influencers on social media, and this is especially common among younger adults.
U.S. adults largely value journalists’ role in society but see their influence declining – and they differ over what a journalist is.
The share of news influencers in our sample with a Bluesky account roughly doubled in the four months after Election Day 2024, from 21% beforehand to 43% by March.
As people are exposed to more information from more sources than ever before, how they define and feel about “news” has become less clear-cut.
A majority of Democrats (60%) are highly concerned about press freedoms – about double the share of Republicans (28%).
Most U.S. adults say they are interested in several types of local crime coverage, but far fewer say this information is easy to find.
More Americans now prefer to get local news online, while fewer turn to TV or print. And most say local news outlets are important to their community.
Four-in-ten Americans who get news from social media say inaccuracy is the thing they dislike most about it – an increase of 9 percentage points since 2018.
40% of Black Americans say that the issues and events most important to them are often covered, and similar shares of Asian (38%) and Hispanic (37%) adults say the same.
In 2016, 51% of U.S. adults said they followed the news all or most of the time, but that share fell to 38% in 2022.
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