By CatholicVote | Created at 2024-11-22 22:21:25 | Updated at 2024-11-23 10:45:41
12 hours ago
CV NEWS FEED // “News influencers” have presented themselves as sources of information on social media in recent years, according to new research from Pew.
Pew looked at the social media accounts of 500 popular news influencers, defined as “individuals who regularly post about current events and civic issues on social media and have at least 100,000 followers on any of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) or YouTube.” News influencers especially had a large online presence leading up to the 2024 election, Pew reported.
Pew found that news influencers were generally men (63% male vs. 30% female) and were slightly more likely to be Republican, conservative, or pro-Trump than Democrat, liberal, or pro-Harris (27% vs. 21%). However, there was almost no difference between the overall percentages of Republicans and Democrats regularly getting their news from news influencers.
The influencers were found to be most common on X (85%), followed by Instagram (50%) and YouTube (44%). The majority of news influencers also used more than one social media platform to reach their audiences.
Pew also found that “news influencers largely offer independent voices from outside the news media.”
“About three-quarters of news influencers (77%) have no past or present affiliation with a news media organization, while 23% have been employed in the news industry in some way,” Pew reported, later adding that “News influencers with a news organization affiliation are less likely to express a clear political orientation.”
Despite a reluctance to identify with a political party, news influencers were found to generally provide information about the U.S. government, politics, and elections (55%). The second most popular topic was social issues (18%), which includes abortion, race, and LGBT-related content, followed by international issues (14%).
According to the research, 21% of polled U.S. adults said they regularly get their news from news influencers. Young adults aged 18-29 were the most likely to get their news from the influencers (37%), compared to 26% of those aged 30-49 and just 15% of those aged 50-64. Only 7% of senior citizens regularly got their news from news influencers.
Pew also found that Americans generally say news influencers “have helped them better understand current events and civic issues.”
Pew added, “These Americans also say they get a variety of different types of information, from basic facts and opinions to funny posts and breaking news. When it comes to opinions, most who see them say they are an even mix of opinions they agree and disagree with (61%), but far more say they mostly agree with what they see (30%) than mostly disagree (2%).”
