• by Wayne Friedman , October 21, 2022

Amidst U.S. consumers' increasing concerns over the veracity of news stories -- and declining consumption on many big social media sites -- a growing share of young Americans are now regularly getting their news via TikTok, says a Pew Research Center study.

In two years, TikTok’s share of U.S. adults who say they regularly get news through its platform is at 10% this year -- up from 3% in 2020.

Twenty-six percent of adults under the age of 30 say they regularly get news on TikTok. This compares with 10% of adults 30 to 49 years old, 4% of people ages 50 to 64, and 1% of those age 65 and older.

Pew says news consumption has either declined or remained about the same in recent years on many other social media platforms.

This includes Twitter, the industry leader for news content among social media -- now at 53% (down from 59% in 2020) of respondents who say they regularly get their news from the platform.

Facebook -- one of the biggest losers -- is down to 44% (from 54%).

Reddit is now at 37% (from 42%), while YouTube is at 30% (from 32%), Snapchat is at 15% (from 19%); and LinkedIn comes in at 13% (from 15%).

Pew Research Center surveyed 12,147 U.S. adults from July 18 to Aug. 21, 2022 -- an online survey panel recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses.

At the same time, traditional cable TV news channels continue to show gains in overall impressions in the most recent third-quarter period 2022, according to iSpot.

Fox News, MSNBC and CNN grew their collective share of TV ad impressions from 22.5% from 20.3% in the third quarter of 2021. Fox was at 76.6 billion impressions, followed by MSNBC at 41.2 billion and CNN, at 35.2 billion.

While it was short of 2020's high-water marks, iSpot says cable TV news is outpacing both the third quarter of 2019 and 2018.