A new report has found that around 1 in 5 Americans admit they get their news from social media influencers instead of a trusted news service.
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The report comes from the Pew Research Center, which found that across party lines, 21% of adults said they get their news from influencers on social media.
When looking at different ages, the report found that the number increased to 37% for adults under the age of 30, compared to 26% of adults aged 30-49 and 15% of adults aged 50-64.
An influencer was defined by the research center as someone who regularly posts about current events and has more than 100,000 on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, or YouTube.
Among those who get their news from social media, 65% said that the influencers they follow have bettered their understanding of current events and civic issues. Another 71% said the news they get from influencers is at least somewhat different from the news they see from other sources.
Pew also surveyed those deemed news influencers, finding that the most popular social media platform was X, with 85% having an account on the social media site. The next biggest were Instagram (50%) and YouTube (44%).
Still, around two-thirds of influencers reported being on more than one site, and 27% said they were on five or more sites. Male influencers were found to be in the majority, representing women influencers 63% to 30 %.
Even though about half of the influencers didn’t have a clear political alliance, 27% of news influencers aligned as right-leaning, while 21% said they were left-leaning.
However, TikTok appeared to break away from the norm, with 28% of news influencers on the platform being left-leaning, 21% being right-leaning, and 45% being female.
The survey was a part of the Pew-Knight Initiative and consisted of 10,000 adults and 500 news influencers. It was conducted from July 15 to Aug 4. There is a margin of error of plus or minus 1.2 percentage points.
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