One important aspect of this project is taking a deeper look at the pathways, or platforms, Americans use most often to access news – such as news websites or apps, social media, local, cable and network TV, radio, or print.Īs of late last year, 18% of U.S. Through several surveys over the last nine months, the Center’s American News Pathways project has been exploring the connection between Americans’ news habits and what they hear and perceive about current events. And, perhaps tied to that, this group also tends to be less knowledgeable about these topics. adults, for instance, tend to be less likely than other news consumers to closely follow major news stories, such as the coronavirus outbreak and the 2020 presidential election. In fact, social media is now among the most common pathways where people – particularly young adults – get their political news.Ī new Pew Research Center analysis of surveys conducted between October 2019 and June 2020 finds that those who rely most on social media for political news stand apart from other news consumers in a number of ways.

The rise of social media has changed the information landscape in myriad ways, including the manner in which many Americans keep up with current events. Visit our interactive data tool to access the questions included in this report, as well as content about the coronavirus outbreak and the 2020 presidential election. See here to read more about the report’s methodology.

adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. The surveys are weighted to be representative of the U.S. Everyone who completed the surveys is a member of Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. adults in each survey ranges from 8,914 to 12,043 U.S. Pew Research Center’s American News Pathways project conducted this study to look at the group of Americans who get most of their political and election news through social media.įor this analysis, we used data from five different surveys conducted from October 2019 to June of 2020.

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