Social media was by far the most popular news platform among 18 to 34-year-olds in the United States, with 47 percent of respondents to a survey held in August 2022 saying that they used social networks for news on a daily basis. By comparison, adults over 65 years old mostly used network news to keep up to date.

The decline of newspapers In the past, the reasons to regularly go out and purchase a print newspaper were many. Used not only for news but also apartment hunting, entertainment, and job searches (among other things), newspapers once served multiple purposes. This is no longer the case, with first television and then the internet taking care of consumer needs once covered by printed papers. Indeed, the paid circulation of daily weekday newspapers in the United States has fallen dramatically since the 1980s with no sign of future improvement.

News consumption habits

A survey on news consumption by gender found that 50 percent of women use either online-only news sites or social media for news each day, and 51 percent of male respondents said the same. Social media was by far the most used daily news platform among U.S. Millennials, and the same was true of Gen Z. One appeal of online news is that it often comes at no cost to the consumer. Paying for news found via digital outlets is not yet commonplace in the United States, with only 21 percent of U.S. consumers responding to a study held in early 2021 reporting having paid for online news content in the last year.

TikTok news consumption is on the rise. Back in 2020, just three percent of respondents to a survey held in the United States stated that they regularly got their news from TikTok. By 2024, this figure had increased almost sixfold to 17 percent. Younger adults – those aged between 18 and 29 years old – are the most frequent TikTok news users, with almost 40 percent getting news there on a regular basis, double that of adults between 30 and 49 years and more than ten times the share of adults aged 65 and above. The rise of TikTok as a news source TikTok’s penetration rate in the U.S. is highest among adults aged between 18 and 24 years. More than three quarters of consumers in this age bracket use the platform, and for teens aged between 12 and 17 years, the figure was similarly high at almost 70 percent. These young users are those driving TikTok’s growing popularity as a news source. Whilst X (formerly known as Twitter) remains the most used social network for news, TikTok is rapidly catching up. Alongside Facebook, TikTok now ranks as the second most popular social media site for news consumption, with 43 percent of U.S. adults regularly using each platform to keep up to date, and TikTok is set to overtake Facebook in the next year in this respect. The share of U.S. adults using Facebook for news fell consistently in every year from 2020 to 2023, whereas in the same time period, the share getting news via TikTok almost doubled. The most popular news publishers on TikTok According to the most recently available data, the leading news publisher on TikTok in the U.S. is socially native brand NowThis, with 5.5 million followers. Targeting left-leaning younger consumers, NowThis describes itself as social media’s number one video news brand. Ranking second, third, and fourth respectively are broadcast TV news outlets ABC, NBC, and CBS with between three and five million followers. Meanwhile, left-leaning cable network CNN had less success with a follower count of under 1.5 million.

A survey held in the United States in 2023 revealed that 40 percent of responding adults said that what they disliked most about getting news on social media was the fact that the news is inaccurate, an increase of nine percent from 2018. Other reasons given were low-quality news or other people's behavior. Social media news consumption is complex With inaccurate news being the main reason consumers dislike news via social networks, the issue of trust also comes into play. Whilst fake and manipulated content can circulate on any platform, social media platforms can exacerbate the matter, with written posts, video footage, and audio easily shared and disseminated at the click of a button. TikTok in particular, with its focus on short-form snappy content, ranked poorly in terms of trusted social networks - 50 percent of U.S. adults responding to a survey considered the platform very untrustworthy. What are the positives of news found on social media? Data from 2023 showed that 20 percent of adults in the United States who used social media to get news stated that convenience was their main reason for doing so. Speed and interaction with people were the two next most popular reasons for using social networking platforms as a source of news. Even so, the majority (more than a third) of respondents said they did not know why they liked getting news on social networks or did not answer. This speaks to the complex relationship the public now has with social media – its convenience, as well as its prevalence in users’ everyday lives, means that it can often be difficult to avoid using it. However, when it comes to news, users remain unsure.

Data from a survey held in August 2022 in the United States revealed that the most popular news source among millennials was social media, with 45 percent of respondents reporting daily news consumption on social networks. This was more than double the share who got their news via radio. When it comes to trust, though, social media does not fare well.

Social media and news consumption

As adults of all ages spend more and more time on social media, news consumption via this avenue is likely to increase, but something which could affect this trend is the lack of trust in the news consumers encounter on social platforms. Although now the preferred option for younger audiences, social networks are among the least trusted news sources in the United States, and concerns about fake news remain prevalent.

Young audiences and fake news

Inaccurate news is a major problem which worsened during the 2016 and 2020 presidential election campaigns and the COVID-19 pandemic. A global study found that most Gen Z and Millennial news consumers ignored fake coronavirus news on social media, but almost 20 percent interacted with such posts in the comments section, and over seven percent shared the content. Younger news consumers in the United States were also the most likely to report feeling overwhelmed by COVID-19 news. As younger audiences were the most likely to get their updates on the outbreak via social media, this also made them the most susceptible to fake news, and younger generations are also the most prone to ‘doomscrolling’, an addictive act where the reader pursues and digests multiple negative or upsetting news articles in one sitting.

This data set belongs to an academic manuscript examining longitudinally (2000-2019) the prevalence of terms denoting far-right and far-left political extremism in a large corpus of more than 32 million written news and opinion articles from 54 news media outlets popular in the United States and the United Kingdom.

The textual content of news and opinion articles from the 54 outlets listed in the main manuscript is available in the outlet's online domains and/or public cache repositories such as Google cache (https://webcache.googleusercontent.com), The Internet Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/web/web.php), and Common Crawl (https://commoncrawl.org). We used derived word frequency counts from these sources. Textual content included in our analysis is circumscribed to articles headlines and main body of text of the articles and does not include other article elements such as figure captions.

Targeted textual content was located in HTML raw data using outlet specific xpath expressions. Tokens were lowercased prior to estimating frequency counts. To prevent outlets with sparse text content for a year from distorting aggregate frequency counts, we only include outlet frequency counts from years for which there is at least 1 million words of article content from an outlet. This threshold was chosen to maximize inclusion in our analysis of outlets with sparse amounts of articles text per year.

Yearly frequency usage of a target word in an outlet in any given year was estimated by dividing the total number of occurrences of the target word in all articles of a given year by the number of all words in all articles of that year. This method of estimating frequency accounts for variable volume of total article output over time.

The list of compressed files in this data set is listed next:

-analysisScripts.rar contains the analysis scripts used in the main manuscript

-articlesContainingTargetWords.rar contains counts of target words in outlets articles as well as total counts of words in articles

Usage Notes

In a small percentage of articles, outlet specific XPath expressions failed to properly capture the content of the article due to the heterogeneity of HTML elements and CSS styling combinations with which articles text content is arranged in outlets online domains. As a result, the total and target word counts metrics for a small subset of articles are not precise. In a random sample of articles and outlets, manual estimation of target words counts overlapped with the automatically derived counts for over 90% of the articles.

Most of the incorrect frequency counts were minor deviations from the actual counts such as for instance counting the word "Facebook" in an article footnote encouraging article readers to follow the journalist’s Facebook profile and that the XPath expression mistakenly included as the content of the article main text. Some additional outlet-specific inaccuracies that we could identify occurred in "The Hill" and "Newsmax" news outlets where XPath expressions had some shortfalls at precisely capturing articles’ content. For "The Hill", in years 2007-2009, XPath expressions failed to capture the complete text of the article in about 40% of the articles. This does not necessarily result in incorrect frequency counts for that outlet but in a sample of articles’ words that is about 40% smaller than the total population of articles words for those three years. In the case of "NewsMax", the issue was that for some articles, XPath expressions captured the entire text of the article twice. Notice that this does not result in incorrect frequency counts. If a word appears x times in an article with a total of y words, the same frequency count will still be derived when our scripts count the word 2x times in the version of the article with a total of 2y words.

To conclude, in a data analysis of 32 million articles, we cannot manually check the correctness of frequency counts for every single article and hundred percent accuracy at capturing articles’ content is elusive due to the small number of difficult to detect boundary cases such as incorrect HTML markup syntax in online domains. Overall however, we are confident that our frequency metrics are representative of word prevalence in print news media content (see Figure 1 in the main manuscript for illustration of the accuracy of the frequency counts).

The number of Pinterest users in the United Kingdom was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2028 by in total 0.3 million users (+3.14 percent). After the ninth consecutive increasing year, the Pinterest user base is estimated to reach 9.88 million users and therefore a new peak in 2028. Notably, the number of Pinterest users of was continuously increasing over the past years.User figures, shown here regarding the platform pinterest, have been estimated by taking into account company filings or press material, secondary research, app downloads and traffic data. They refer to the average monthly active users over the period and count multiple accounts by persons only once.The shown data are an excerpt of Statista's Key Market Indicators (KMI). The KMI are a collection of primary and secondary indicators on the macro-economic, demographic and technological environment in up to 150 countries and regions worldwide. All indicators are sourced from international and national statistical offices, trade associations and the trade press and they are processed to generate comparable data sets (see supplementary notes under details for more information).

The number of Instagram users in the United Kingdom was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2028 by in total 2.1 million users (+7.02 percent). After the ninth consecutive increasing year, the Instagram user base is estimated to reach 32 million users and therefore a new peak in 2028. Notably, the number of Instagram users of was continuously increasing over the past years.User figures, shown here with regards to the platform instagram, have been estimated by taking into account company filings or press material, secondary research, app downloads and traffic data. They refer to the average monthly active users over the period and count multiple accounts by persons only once.The shown data are an excerpt of Statista's Key Market Indicators (KMI). The KMI are a collection of primary and secondary indicators on the macro-economic, demographic and technological environment in up to 150 countries and regions worldwide. All indicators are sourced from international and national statistical offices, trade associations and the trade press and they are processed to generate comparable data sets (see supplementary notes under details for more information).

The number of LinkedIn users in the United Kingdom was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2028 by in total 1.5 million users (+4.51 percent). After the eighth consecutive increasing year, the LinkedIn user base is estimated to reach 34.7 million users and therefore a new peak in 2028. User figures, shown here with regards to the platform LinkedIn, have been estimated by taking into account company filings or press material, secondary research, app downloads and traffic data. They refer to the average monthly active users over the period and count multiple accounts by persons only once.The shown data are an excerpt of Statista's Key Market Indicators (KMI). The KMI are a collection of primary and secondary indicators on the macro-economic, demographic and technological environment in up to 150 countries and regions worldwide. All indicators are sourced from international and national statistical offices, trade associations and the trade press and they are processed to generate comparable data sets (see supplementary notes under details for more information).

Data on local news consumption in the United Kingdom found that local groups or accounts on social media and the BBC website or app were the most used online sources of local news as of March 2023, with around 40 to 55 percent of those aged 16 years or older having used these in the month or so running to the survey. Adults aged 55 to 64 years were the most engaged with local news via social media groups and accounts.

A study examining perspectives on the news media from over 40 countries revealed that levels of trust differed notably around the world. Scandinavians in particular had greater trust in the news media than citizens from other parts of the world, with 69 percent of Finns trusting the news, along with 57 percent of Danes and 55 percent of Norwegians. Who trusts the news the least? South Korea and Taiwan were placed among the lowest in the world when it came to how much consumers trusted the news media, alongside Hungary, Slovakia, and Bulgaria. Media sources in some of these countries can be considered to be insufficiently independent from the establishment. Just 23 percent of Greek consumers had trust in the news media, the lowest among all countries in the report. What affects trust in news? One factor which can greatly affect trust in news is the outlet used. Globally, social media is seen as a less reliable source of news, and in the EU radio and television are viewed as more dependable. In the current climate of fake news and polarizing political events, young people around the world are having a tough time relying on the mass media , although this attitude is also seen among older generations.

A global survey conducted in the fourth quarter of 2023 found that the main reason for using social media was to keep in touch with friends and family, with over 49 percent of social media users saying this was their main reason for using online networks. Overall, 38 percent of social media users said that filling spare time was their main reason for using social media platforms, whilst 34.3 percent of respondents said they used it to read news stories. One in five users were on social platforms for the reason of following celebrities and influencers. The most popular social network Facebook dominates the social media landscape. The world's most popular social media platform turned 20 in February 2024, and it continues to lead the way in terms of user numbers. As of January 2024, the social network had over three billion global users. YouTube, WhatsApp, and Instagram follow, but none of these well-known brands can surpass Facebook’s audience size. Moreover, as of the final quarter of 2023, there were almost four billion Meta product users. Ever-evolving social media usage The utilization of social media remains largely gratuitous; however, companies have been encouraging users to become paid subscribers to reduce dependence on advertising profits. Meta Verified entices users by offering a blue verification badge and proactive account protection, among other things. X (formerly Twitter), Snapchat, and Reddit also offer users the chance to upgrade their social media accounts for a monthly free.