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US Adults Who Mostly Rely On Social Media For News Are Less Informed, Exposed To More Conspiracies: Study (techcrunch.com) 193

According to a new report from Pew Research, U.S. adults who get their news largely from social media platforms tend to fllow the news less closely and end up less informed on several key subjects when compared to those who use other sources, like TV, radio, and news publications. TechCrunch reports: The firm first asked people how they most commonly get their news. About one-in-five (18%) said they mostly use social media to stay current. That's close the percentages of those who say they use local TV (16%) or cable TV (16%) news, but fewer than those who say they go directly to a news website or app (25%). Another 13% said they use network TV and only 3% said they read a newspaper. To be clear, any study that asks users to self-report how they do something isn't going to be as useful as those that collect hard data on what the consumers actually do. In other words, people who think they're getting most of their news from TV may be, in reality, undercounting the time they spent on social media â" or vice versa.

That said, among this group of "primarily" social media news consumers, only 8% said they were following the key news story of the 2020 U.S. election "every closely," compared with 37% of cable TV viewers who said the same, or the 33% of print users who also said this. The social media group, on this topic, was closer to the local TV group (11%). On the topic of the coronavirus outbreak, only around a quarter (23%) of the primarily social media news consumers said they were following news of COVID-19 "very closely." All other groups again reported a higher percentage, including those who primarily used cable TV (50%), national network TV (50%), news websites and apps (44%), and local TV (32%) for news.

Related to this finding, the survey respondents were also asked 29 different fact-based questions about news topics from recent days, including those on Trump's impeachment, the COVID-19 outbreak, and others. Those who scored the lowest on these topics were the consumers who said they primarily used social media to get their news. Across 9 questions related to foundational political knowledge, only 17% of primarily social media news consumers scored "high political knowledge," meaning they got 8 to 9 of the questions right. 27% scored "middle political knowledge" (6-7 right) and 57% scored "low political knowledge" (5 or fewer right.) The only group that did worse were those who primarily relied on local TV. 45% of who got their news from news primarily via websites and apps, meanwhile, had "high political knowledge," compared with 42% for radio, 41% for print, 35% for cable TV, and 29% for network TV. The social media group of news consumers was also more exposed to fringe conspiracies, like the idea that the pandemic was intentionally planned.

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US Adults Who Mostly Rely On Social Media For News Are Less Informed, Exposed To More Conspiracies: Study

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  • Advice (Score:4, Funny)

    by Presence Eternal ( 56763 ) on Thursday July 30, 2020 @04:27PM (#60349199)

    Trust half of what you see and none of what you hear.

    • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

      by wickedsteve ( 729684 )
      Don't believe everything you think.
    • Re:Advice (Score:5, Insightful)

      by saloomy ( 2817221 ) on Thursday July 30, 2020 @04:43PM (#60349269)

      This is an ass-hat study. You can't possibly turn to the 24-7 opinion / editorial content you get on CNN / NBC / CBS / FOX for "news". We have no more "news". Everything is pespective now. There is no more:

      "today, this person met with that person, they discussed these things, and in a joint statement said such and such"

      News reporting as a profession is dead. Its all spin these days. Any belief in the opposite is the result of indoctrination.

      • Re:Advice (Score:4, Insightful)

        by omnichad ( 1198475 ) on Thursday July 30, 2020 @05:08PM (#60349367) Homepage

        Have we ever had this?

        Just a quick skim of Google's Ngram viewer says that "story angle" has existed as a phrase since at least the 50s. Newspapers from the 1700s printed pro-revolutionary propaganda as news even then.

        Nobody buys a newspaper to read dry facts. Knowing which dry facts are important is a matter of story. It's human nature. News Media is dying even with sensationalist clickbait. Newspaper sellers on the street in the 20s weren't crying out "Come get your paper and read about two people meeting and talking about something."

        • "Newspaper sellers on the street in the 20s weren't crying out "Come get your paper and read about two people meeting and talking about something."

          Likely because they have to cater to the populace who seems to be getting dumber and dumber, despite carrying a device in their pockets with access to the world's knowledge, in order to just stay afloat.

          It seems everything is about feelings, feelings, and feelings nowadays.

          Go watch the DOCUMENTARY called "Idiocracy" to see where we were headed. Those film

      • Re: Advice (Score:2, Interesting)

        There's an old Soviet joke: "We know how to read Pravda. Do you know how to read the New York Times?"

        I'd actually say that it's easier now to read the NYT than it was back when that joke was made. Back then, you see, the NYT styled itself as an impartial news outlet. Today, its it's obvious that it has a far left slant in the way its stories are framed. Same with Fox. You know what Hannity is about, so you take Bret Beier with the appropriate grain of salt.

        Bottom line: the citizen is never relieved from t
        • Re: New York Times (Score:5, Informative)

          by ttfkam ( 37064 ) on Thursday July 30, 2020 @06:54PM (#60349707) Homepage Journal

          Their main columns are fairly middle of the road, maybe slightly liberal. Their editorial columns on the other hand⦠clear conservative bias.

          Folks on the left often *hate* their editorial columns, which have a completely separate editorial staff and culture.

          But if you think New York Times is clearly liberal, pretty sure what you think is the center is skewed very far to the right relative to the US and downright reactionary conservative when compared to the rest of the world.

          If you include the US's allies as a baseline, there is no major left wing party in the US. Democrats would be considered center to center-right. I am hesitant to say what the rest of the world thinks of the political platform of the GOP.

          • The haters don't even know that it is the editors who get to massage the stories to add bias, not the writers.

          • Re: New York Times (Score:5, Insightful)

            by arglebargle_xiv ( 2212710 ) on Thursday July 30, 2020 @08:55PM (#60349969)

            If you include the US's allies as a baseline, there is no major left wing party in the US. Democrats would be considered center to center-right. I am hesitant to say what the rest of the world thinks of the political platform of the GOP.

            Beat me to it. From where I am, a long way from the US, the parties, and a lot of the news media, are center-right to reasonably far right. The whole US worldview is skewed so far to the right that what's considered left-wing in the US is, at best, conservative in the rest of the world.

            Which is why I rely on non-US media to report on US events, they're not tied up in the political shitstorm that seems to have enveloped all reporting there. The Guardian is my favourite source of intelligent reporting on the US.

        • Re: Advice (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Aighearach ( 97333 ) on Thursday July 30, 2020 @07:55PM (#60349849)

          [the NYT] has a far left slant

          The New York Times is, and always was, the nicer, more polite newspaper for rich people in New York, as compared to the Wall Street Journal.

          The idea that it is some sort of liberal mouthpiece is hilarious to the point of absurdity. In the Olden Times only people who got their news from AM radio said things this stupid.

        • by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
          Far left? Has far left changed its definition recently? It's not even particularly left let alone far left.
      • > Everything is perspective now

        It always has been way. The only difference today is that what is considered "normal" is MUCH wider then before. The news have moved from being conservative to exploitative sensationalism decades ago. Click-bait is more important then any so called "facts."

        > News reporting as a profession is dead. Its all spin these days

        Almost dead. Independents are the only hope right now.

        * Allsides [allsides.com] tags news articles with L, C, R so you can see which side of the spectrum they fall

      • Its probably correct studty, except that the summary of it is exaggerated BS.

        Sure, Americans only viewing social media for news will be fed a diet of crap, conspiracy and nonsense. And this shows - 17% got things right.

        But then look at the numbers for network TV: 29% scored "high political knowledge", hardly a massive improvement, still down there in the realms of "morons educating morons".

        Mind you, the greatest number of people getting their news via social media only are the under 30 category, and I'm tol

      • There is no more:

        "today, this person met with that person, they discussed these things, and in a joint statement said such and such"

        News reporting as a profession is dead. Its all spin these days.

        Reuters, BBC, NPR.

        Any belief in the opposite is the result of indoctrination.

        That's derpy.

      • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        Bullshit false equivalency

      • "News reporting as a profession is dead. Its all spin these days. Any belief in the opposite is the result of indoctrination."

        Grow up, and read the damned news. Stop being a baby about it. Think about the perspective of the author for a minute and stop being so mentally lazy. Their job isn't to make the news feel good.

      • by antus ( 6211764 )
        This is not true. It is true in the USA perhaps, but there are quality news services in other countries, especially those backed and required by some governments. If you want quality news check out the Australian Broadcasting Commision abc.net.au, the BBC bbc.com , the guardian https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com] even aljazeera.com . Quality news is out there, the problem is you need to go looking, facebook wont feed it to you. The other problem is the title does not just apply to adults, but children too. I
      • This is an ass-hat study. You can't possibly turn to the 24-7 opinion / editorial content you get on CNN / NBC / CBS / FOX for "news". We have no more "news". Everything is pespective now. There is no more:
        "today, this person met with that person, they discussed these things, and in a joint statement said such and such"
        News reporting as a profession is dead. Its all spin these days. Any belief in the opposite is the result of indoctrination.

        It's not quite as stark as you put it. There is news on CNN, NBC, CBS and yes, even FOX. But every news outlet has certain ratios of:
        News / Spin /Sensationalism / Bullshit (not counting advertisments)

        I remember 25 years ago, watching CNN network was about
        75% news, 20% Sensationalism, 5% Spin and practically no bullshit.

        These days visiting cnn.com it's about
        35% News, 30% Sensationalism, 25% Spin, 10% Bullshit

        foxnews.com is about
        15% news, 35% Sensationalism, 35% Spin, 15% Bullshit

        For comparison, The Sun, UK's

        • I forgot to write what I was getting at.
          There is "news" on mainstream media, but readers and news watchers should be very well aware that almost everything is opinionated in one way or another, and you have to learn to separate the actual news content from the spin and sometimes also the bullshit.

    • This is an odd way to summarize things. This says that people who read social media know less about questions like whether "Tarrifs had generally increased since Trump took office" (which few people in any group got right) and then somehow related this to a different poll where people were asked if they had seen various claims.

      It's weird, because the summary is trying to tell us that people who get their news online are all conspiracists... according to an online news agency that selected which conspiracie

      • You sound surprised. You know the metaphor about a house of cards? I really hope I live to see it crash.

      • This says that people who read social media know less about questions like whether "Tarrifs had generally increased since Trump took office" (which few people in any group got right)

        That's a tough one. I have an idea about some of the new trade agreements that have been made, but there are 195 countries in the world and I don't know what happened in most of them.

        And how do you define "generally?"

    • You mean online gossip doesn't accurately represent news of today?

    • What if you're already one-eyed?
  • Obvious but painful (Score:5, Informative)

    by JeffOwl ( 2858633 ) on Thursday July 30, 2020 @04:31PM (#60349213)
    The point we should take from this is that there are adults in the USA that rely on social media as their primary source of news. The fact that those who would do that tend to be misinformed goes without saying.
    • by Latent Heat ( 558884 ) on Thursday July 30, 2020 @04:41PM (#60349259)

      I rely on Slashdot.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by saloomy ( 2817221 )

      There are no well-informed adults in the US anymore. Half believe one side, the other half believe the other side. If you think either is right, that's just the side you were indoctrinated with.

      • by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Thursday July 30, 2020 @04:55PM (#60349313)

        There are a few of us well aware that both "sides" are completely full of shit. The sad part of that being if we want to keep ourselves informed we have to hunt for facts rather than reading/watching the constant stream of opinion pieces on the mainstream media. And it gets harder to find factual sources nearly every day.

        Most of my fellow Americans are lazy enough they either give up, or pick a side and ride it out.

        • by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Thursday July 30, 2020 @05:55PM (#60349527)
          My hypothesis is that people were just as poorly informed and crazy before the internet. You just had no way of knowing.
          • by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

            As evidence of this, find a picture of a grocery store checkout endcap from 1985, and tke a look at the periodicals. There was be a 3:1 ratio of tabloids to news sources. That tells you what sold. The internet reflects the same thing.

            • by dryeo ( 100693 )

              That's just evidence of impulse buying, someone sees the lead about Elvis and goes, "I just have to read that". If I was planning on buying a newspaper, I'd pick it up at the entrance.
              Another difference was many households got the newspaper delivered to their door.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday July 30, 2020 @05:51PM (#60349517) Homepage Journal

        I hate this post-truth "there are no facts" rubbish.

        The worst part is the false equivalence. Both sides are not the same, all news sources are not equally false or biased.

        • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

          Yes, absolutely. Also, people can consume editorial content without failing to understand the editorial point of view. Only some sources push a narrative while claiming to be "fair and balanced". Journalism is not dead, that is literally the narrative of those who endeavor to kill it.

    • Since the mainstream media is mostly opinion rather than factual news, social media just have a variety of different biases rather than the mainstream media prevailing bias.
      • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        Bullshit. You've been duped by the misinformation campaign. Mainstream media is not "mostly opinion", although the ones you consume may be.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • >"I have about twenty online news sources (not opinion columns) that I get my news from."

        You should list them for us. I probably look at some of them.

        >"The ones I don't trust anymore are CNN, MSNBC, and CBS."

        It has been a loooong time since I have trusted those. I often look at sites I don't trust, just to get perspective, but I won't even bother with the above ones, anymore, because they have fallen off the edge.

  • Ironically, I saw that this had been posted because of Slashdot's Twitter feed. More seriously, I wonder if there's a causation v. correlation issue here? Maybe the sort of people who are prone to being ignorant or liking conspiracy theories are also the sort of people who like something about getting information from social media? Tough to tell which direction this goes in.
    • Could be, but I think Occam would go with the information platform leading to levels of information than with levels of information leading to an information platform. If it were the latter, you would expect to see platform upgrade as people become more informed. Anecdotally, I think we all recognize that people who watch TV aren't going to start reading the newspaper because they learned some shit on the Discovery Channel or CNN.

  • by ZipprHead ( 106133 ) on Thursday July 30, 2020 @04:33PM (#60349229) Homepage

    Pew Research tells us that people who read are smarter. News at 11.

    I hesitate to share this on Facebook for fear of being called a racist.

  • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Thursday July 30, 2020 @04:35PM (#60349233)

    People trying to find out what is going on in Seattle riots [twitter.com] are much better informed from social media than by other sources.

    For other topics social media is a wasteland, so it's a mixed bag...

    But then again, traditional news is also prone to spreading rumor and conspiracies. They tried to promote the Russia hoax, the "Fine People" hoax [cnn.com] and so badly blundered in attacking some teenagers from Covington high school that multiple news companies have had to pay millions in lawsuit settlements [cnn.com] for defamation once the facts were known.

    So it's not like straying outside social media will prevent you from being exposed to outright crazy theories either,

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by SumDog ( 466607 )

      There is major bias in the way media outlets are reporting Portland and Seattle and it's sickening. As a former Capitol Hill resident, I know from people on the ground there that it's no 'summer of love'. It was shootings, rampant homeless, the city encouraging everything (that's what's in the lawsuit) .. people were afraid to go out for groceries at night. ISPs refused to send repair people to fix Internet. Even after the cops cleaned it out, protestors were back yelling two weeks later.

      In Portland, USA To

    • of proving the articles point, to wit:

      1. Your link to the lawsuit doesn't say what the settlement was for. It specifically states they declined to release the terms of the settlement.

      2. As for the incident, the Black Hebrew Israelites are nut jobs, but they're generally harmless nut jobs. I spent years being bullied (I'm a nerd, an actual nerd) and I know that smile. That punk's smile was, in my opinion (gotta stay legal here) an attempt to goad a punch. And that Native American guy, who's been atte
    • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      "People trying to find out what is going on in Seattle riots [twitter.com] are much better informed from social media than by other sources."

      Citations please.

      "But then again, traditional news is also prone to spreading rumor and conspiracies. They tried to promote the Russia hoax, the "Fine People" hoax [cnn.com] ..."

      You are truly an idiot, not just for your abject stupidity and gross lack of ethics, but also for your moronic citing of "facts".

      "So it's not like straying outside social media will prevent you

  • ... that's what the Illuminati want you to think!

  • by Arzaboa ( 2804779 ) on Thursday July 30, 2020 @04:39PM (#60349251)

    Oy Vey! This article's title should be changed to, "Those who rely on gossip for their news...."

    --
    Some say our national pastime is baseball. Not me. It's gossip. - Erma Bombeck

  • by inode_buddha ( 576844 ) on Thursday July 30, 2020 @04:54PM (#60349311) Journal

    Does anyone else remember the Fairness Doctrine? It specifically disallowed media empires and concentration of power. Example: If you owned a TV station, you could not also own the newspaper or the radio.

    Today, 90% of the mass media in the US is owned by 6 corporations, and controlled by those who control those corporations. Do you really think they have your interests at heart?

    Is it any wonder people are looking for alternatives, and getting screwed even further in the process?

    Reagan proposed doing away with the Fairness Doctrine, but Clinton actually did it. They were both two different sides of the same coin.
    And if you proposed bringing it back, the so-called Left will howl about "freedom of the press" and the so-called Right will howl about Commies taking away their Freedums.

    • Corporations like Sinclair seem quaint compared to the unrivaled influence that a corporation like Alphabet is capable of.

      Slashdot leftists doesn't seem to mind the national dialogue being at the tender mercies of a few big tech corporate executives. However I suspect that letting people like Jack Dorsey or Susan Wojcicki decide which politicians are capable of gaining enough public awareness to be electable may not bode well for us in the long run.

      I think we need a "Fairness Doctrine" more for algorithms t

    • by Duhavid ( 677874 ) on Thursday July 30, 2020 @06:39PM (#60349671)

      My reading says that the important parts of the Fairness Doctrine were repealed by Reagan in 1987.
      Clinton did away with two corollaries of the doctrine, the rule on personal attacks and the rule on political editorials.

      On your "the left will howl", in 2005, two democrats attempted to re-introduce the doctrine.
      It was rejected by the republicans in the house and senate.

  • This just a conspiracy theory about social media!
  • People who rely on social media as their news feed tend to be rather stupid.

    Ergo, they believe the stuff they see.

    It's that the people themselves are gullible, not that the medium is PARTICULARLY conducive to one flavor of bullshittery vs another.

  • ... that's the word on the street anyway.

  • Two years ago a survey was done [marketwatch.com] which found people who listened to Rush Limbaugh, the Fox tabloid, and Breitbart were the most biased group of news consumers.

    I'm certain if you took the people in the current group and overlaid them with the above group, there would be a serious amount of overlap.

    It's almost as people on the right don't value science, education, or facts.

    • But people who follow democracy now! and Now This! value science, education or facts, right?

      Its not a right / left thing at all.

      The left has its bubble as well.

  • I read that on the Internet somewhere.
    - Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz

    Still waiting for that payout for helping my friend, the defamed Nigerian Price.

  • Adults who rely on the mainstream media are more misinformed.

  • Studies show that people who only eat free food tend to suffer from malnutrition and get a LOT more food poisoning

    People who only accept free housing tend to live in dumps.

    People who only take free medicine are less healthy and die earlier

    People who only undergo free education are dumber on average and are generally referred to as "waiter"

    Drug users who only use stuff that's free are technically referred to in the medical community as "dumb-ass corpses"



    I pay around 150 bucks a year
    • If you don't pay for it, you're not the customer but the product.

      Yes, that is true for news, too. Because someone will pay for the news you get. Either you pay for it or someone else does. And now take a wild guess why that someone would pay to give you "information".

  • by kenh ( 9056 ) on Thursday July 30, 2020 @05:20PM (#60349423) Homepage Journal

    I can't wait to share it on social media - no need to read the article, the headline is amazing enough, no need to get all bogged down with actual information!

  • Does this actually show more than the obvious fact that the more news sources one tends to consult the more likely you are to be informed?

    You can hide a lot of sins being 'mostly rely on' in your study.

  • Especially headlines on the Fark politics tab.

    I'm still not sure what people mean when they say they get their news from Facebook. I've never had a FB account so I thought they were reading articles or watching videos from news websites there, but maybe they actually mean they're getting their news from what their "Friends" are saying there.

    I really hope people only got the one wrong about the number of votes in the Electoral College because they thought it was the number of Representatives and not the num

  • Often attributed to Mark Twain, though there is no evidence he wrote it:
    "If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed."

    But apparently in 1807 Thomas Jefferson wrote this:
    "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies

  • by syousef ( 465911 ) on Thursday July 30, 2020 @11:39PM (#60350291) Journal

    Yeah, it's almost as if failing to check the source of your information makes you gullible.

  • Social Media goal is to keep you on the platform to feed you with more ads regardless of what you're reading. Their algorithms will give you more "exciting" news as long as you stay on them. It is it easier to notice on Youtube, I love maker videos, if I start watching some random video I got from another source, I'll be presented on the right bar with similar content, only more extreme... More complex, more failures, more brutal, eventually I get into some inventions that turns in some car crash, "top 5" r

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