A study recently conducted by the Pew Research Center has revealed that US users of Facebook and Twitter are becoming more exposed to external news through these social media platforms.
The study, which derives its findings from a survey of over 2,000 adults in the US, indicates considerable rises in the percentages of adult users of these social networking sites reporting that the sites provide them with news concerning “events and issues outside of friends and family”.
TechCrunch cites 63% of Facebook users and an identical percentage of Twitter users stating this in the recent survey. This, the tech news website adds, compares to 47% and 52% of, respectively, Facebook and Twitter users giving this response when surveyed in 2013.
The report prepared by Pew observes: “The share of Americans for whom Twitter and Facebook serve as a source of news is continuing to rise. This rise comes primarily from more current users encountering news there rather than large increases in the user base overall”.
Facebook and Twitter staff might consider these findings largely irrelevant to their management of the websites, considering that they commonly portray these sites as neutral platforms for content distribution by users. Nonetheless, these sites’ use of algorithms to influence what types of content, including news, users see could have implications for how these users see the world.
