• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, January 12, 2021

Slightly more than half (53%) of Americans get their news from social media at least some of the time, but an increasing percentage of them feel it is making them more confused about current events. That's the finding of a new report from the Pew Research Center, which has been tracking Americans' use of social media for news for several years.

While the report does not delve explicitly into the use of social media to convey disinformation and "fake news," it suggests that social media is becoming a less reliable source of news for many Americans.

Not surprisingly, Facebook is the primary social media source of news, with more than a third (36%) of Americans citing it the social network as a "regular source" for news, followed by YouTube (23%), Twitter (15%), Instagram (11%), Reddit (6%), Snapchat (4%), LinkedIn (4%), TikTok (3%), WhatsApp (3%), Twitch (1%) and Tumbler (1%).

The report does not track some more extremist sources of news dissemination, such as 4Chan, 8Chan, Parler, Gab, etc., but the implication is there is a long tail of social media used for distributing and accessing news.