Americans now use social media as their primary news source, research shows

The top source of news for Americans is no longer TV; it’s social media.

This is according to new research by Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) (via NiemanLab), which found that 54 percent of people in the U.S. get news via social media and video networks, overtaking TV broadcast news and news websites and apps for the first time ever.

The global study was conducted via an online questionnaire from market research firm YouGov from mid-January to the end of February 2025, meaning it’s likely skewed towards a younger population and people who are into social media. The authors of the study acknowledge this.

“Online samples will tend to under-represent the news consumption habits of people who are older and less affluent, meaning online use is typically over-represented and traditional offline use under-represented. In this sense, it is sometimes better to think of results as representative of the online population,” the authors say.

Still, the study shows the sharp rise of social media and online video as news sources in the U.S. According to the study, back in 2013 social media and video were a source of news for just 27 percent of the U.S. population. Now, 54 percent turn to social media as source of news; in comparison, 50 percent of people get news from TV, 48 percent get news via online news sites, and just 14 percent get news from print.

Notably, the study, which has been conducted worldwide, reveals that not all countries are the same with this regard. For example, the trends are similar in the U.S., many Latin American countries including Brazil, a number of African countries, as well as Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. On the flip side, in many European countries, as well as in Japan, social media has far less of an influence.

Not all countries show the same trends.
Credit: Reuters Institute

In terms of how folks in the U.S. access the news, they primarily (57 percent) use their phones, and they prefer watching the news to reading it, with 72 percent watching online news videos on a weekly basis.

As expected, these shifts towards social media and video happen faster among younger groups, particularly those aged 18-24. But the overall findings show what many folks working in newsrooms already understand: The way people consume the news is changing quickly, and there’s probably no turning back.