A Pew Research Center study of trust in the US media, published in September 2011, reported that just over a quarter of American adults — 27% — regularly or sometimes got news or headlines through Facebook, Twitter or another social networking site, rising to 38% among younger adults.
Those figures covered all 1,501 respondents, and the more interesting number sat underneath them. Only 44% of the sample were regular users of social networking sites at all, which gives 660 people who could plausibly be getting news that way. Recalculated against that base, the share of social media users taking news from Facebook or Twitter rises to 61%. A 2010 survey of Canadian news habits had found 42% of social media users getting some of their news daily from sites like Facebook, and that the heavier the use of social media, the likelier a person was to treat it as a news source.
On what people were getting there, 72% told Pew they mostly saw the same news and information they would have found elsewhere. The most common reason given for going to social media for news was convenience, at 20%, ahead of variety at 18% and quality at 12%. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press concluded that social networking had expanded the ways in which the public gets news and information — an expansion of routes rather than of content.