The Canadian Media Research Consortium report Social Networks Transforming How Canadians Get the News produced two figures that looked contradictory. Seventy-one per cent of Canadians who use social networks — more than 10 million people — valued them as a way of keeping up with the news. Yet only 25 per cent of all Canadians online regarded social networks as a reliable news source.
The gap was a question of who was asked. The reliability question went to every participant, users and non-users alike, and just under 60 per cent of the sample used social media regularly. The remaining 40 per cent had no reason to trust a media ecosystem they were not part of.
Among the users, social recommendation was doing real work. Forty-three per cent of them took some of their news every day from media and links shared by friends and family on sites like Facebook, which worked out at 6.5 million Canadians. Almost two-thirds of that group said their networks exposed them to more news and information than they would have seen had they relied only on the choices made by professional journalists.
The report was based on an online survey of a representative national sample of 1,682 adults conducted by Angus Reid Public Opinion, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 per cent, 19 times out of 20, weighted to Statistics Canada data on age, gender, region and education.