More Americans are getting their news from social media influencers

Roughly one in five Americans say they regularly get their news from “news influencers” on social media, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center.

The rise of informative social media personalities, especially among younger users, comes at a time of increasing polarization surrounding the U.S. presidential election.

“We looked at news influencers as a source of authority for their audience about what’s going on in the world,” Galen Stocking, a senior computational social scientist at Pew Research Center, told CNBC. Ta. “One of the things we found was that 65% said they felt the information they got from news influencers helped them better understand the world.”

Nearly 40% of adults under 30 who participated in the survey said they stay informed by independent social media figures, the highest percentage of any age group. .

Basil Smickle, a Democratic strategist and Columbia University professor, said this shift has been going on since at least 2016.

“Part of the reason is convenience,” Smickle said. “You can access all the information you need on your phone. So, with social media inundating us with information, the ease of access to information cannot be ignored.”

But Smikle said convenience can become a hard habit to break and lead to further spread of misinformation.

“If you get information through social media, how do you know how original that information is?” he said. “It’s very difficult to verify that, but unfortunately the algorithm doesn’t care. It just keeps sending out the same kind of information.”

Of the roughly 500 accounts that Pew defined as “news influencers” for the study, about two-thirds were active on multiple platforms from July to August.

Social media site X remains the most popular, with 85% of influencer respondents saying they use the site. metaInstagram, owned by , took second place, and YouTube, the most popular platform for Gen Z (people born between 1997 and 2012), took third place. TikTok was the sixth most popular among influencers, below Meta’s Threads and Facebook.

Questions about the influence of independent social media creators on politics arose before and after the presidential election.

Both candidates used social media to appeal to young voters, most notably President-elect Donald Trump’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast and Vice President Kamala Harris’ appearance on the podcast “Call Her.” Daddy,” both podcasts have gained large followings on social media.

“It’s become exponentially easier to get information in front of voters, so much so that you don’t have to go looking for it because I can keep it out there all the time,” Smickle said. spoke. .

Smickle said social media is also a much cheaper option for candidates looking to reach a larger audience, especially when you add in news influencers who can post about candidates and their platforms.

Syracuse professor Joshua Dahl says candidates may find it easier to get their message across via a podcast than in a traditional network interview. Network interviews in recent elections have tended to be more combative than those conducted on independent podcasts or social media accounts, Darr said.

“It’s probably good for voters to have a tough sit-down interview, but if it’s a rapid-fire series of questions, I don’t know if the campaign will respond to that,” he said.

One consequence, Smickle said, is that misinformation can spread more easily.

“There were criteria that the networks used to determine what was true,” he says. “Those guardrails disappear through social media.”

Alaina Wood, one of the news influencers listed in the Pew report, said misinformation often spreads so widely that it can only be countered after it has a real impact.

Wood’s content is primarily based on climate news, with her series specifically featuring positive climate stories. After East Tennessee communities were hit by Hurricane Helen in September, misinformation began to spread about people accused of theft in the aftermath of the storm, she said.

“Everyone agrees that trying to address misinformation before it becomes a problem is extremely helpful,” she says. The problem, Wood said, is that videos that correct misinformation often don’t go as viral as the original clips.

Previous Pew research found that more women than men consume news on sites like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, but this study found that nearly two-thirds of news influencers It was suggested that he was male.

This difference is most pronounced on YouTube and Facebook, where 68% and 67% of news influencers are male, respectively. On TikTok, about 50% of respondents were male, compared to 48% who were female and 2% who identified as non-binary or gender indeterminate.

Matteo, who is referred to as “The Righteous Man” on his social media accounts, is one of the influencers named in the report, who often clashes with other creators online over misinformation and national politics. He said he noticed significant differences in the gender breakdown and political ideology of viewers across different platforms.

“You get hated on YouTube,” he told CNBC. “That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop posting what I post. But I think the majority of people who respond to my videos are very conservative. And YouTube is probably as close to MAGA as it gets.” I think so.”

Of the 52% of influencers who responded to Pew researchers with a clear political orientation, more identified with politics that lean more to the right, according to the report. This difference is even greater on certain platforms, including Facebook, where three times as many respondents identify as conservative than as liberal.

Mateo said his audience on TikTok, which he started following on social media and is still his primary platform, is much more liberal and primarily female.

“Most people interact with content that they enjoy, and that feeds into the algorithm, creating an echo chamber,” he said. “If you don’t realize that, just because you feel an affinity for the information you’re consuming, you’ll assume that everyone around you feels 100% the same way.”

Political stratification on social media is likely to become even stronger over time.

X owner Elon Musk has become a close ally of Trump and has drawn criticism from many on social media, with some leaving the platform altogether.

Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University and one of the influential figures named in the Pew report, announced his resignation from Mr. X on the Monday after the election.

“For some time, Twitter has been a means of providing journalistic education publicly, for the general public, and for free,” he wrote to X. “I think I was competent at times in that role. I don’t see how it’s done anymore.”

Bluesky, a microblogging startup that has positioned itself as an alternative to X, gained more than 1.25 million new users in the week after Trump’s victory.

“We’re very aware of the fact that people’s decisions not to post on X are amplifying that echo chamber,” Mateo said. “So that’s creating a more radicalized audience because that’s all they’re listening to.”