Facebook Is Still No.1 Social Media Site For News, But Users Are Wary

Americans still turn to Facebook more often than any other social media site for their news consumption, according to the latest analysis from the Pew Research Center, but Facebook’s dominance as a provider of news and information has been falling for the past several years. According to a November 2023 Pew study, 43% of U.S. adults regularly turn to Facebook for news, down from 54% in 2020. Other platforms with high rates of regular news consumption included YouTube (26%), Instagram (16%) and TikTok (14%).

February 2024 marks the twentieth anniversary of the launch of Facebook, which began as “TheFacebook,” a social networking site for Harvard University students. It has enjoyed continuous overall growth since then, according to the company’s quarterly reports and aggregated data from Statista, primarily due to its expansion outside of the U.S.

In the U.S., there are signs that enthusiasm for the site is waning. Overall use has remained flat since 2016, and there has been a drop-off in users age 13-17, according to Pew Research Center. Only about a third of teens use Facebook today, compared to 71% in 2015. TikTok’s overall use has grown the fastest in that time.

Across all social media sites, users express growing concern about the veracity of the information they receive. According to a February 2024 analysis from Pew, four-in-ten Americans who get news from social media say inaccuracy is the thing they dislike most about it, an increase of 9% since 2018. This included concerns about unverified facts, misinformation, “fake news” and unreliable sources.

As a news distributor, Facebook has a uniquely thorny record. A 2023 study published by Government Information Quarterly found that frequent Facebook users were more likely to consume misinformation or “fake news” than users of other platforms. Further, researchers in a 2023 USC-led study found that it was the incentive structure of the platform itself — not individual user behavior — that was to blame for the spread of misinformation. According to the researchers, Facebook’s algorithm is designed to reward and prioritize the sharing of incendiary content.

These were the conditions under which the 2020 Presidential Election and subsequent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol occurred, fueling speculation about Facebook’s role in the attack. A 2021 report from the online advocacy group Avaaz found that, in the eight months leading up to the election, Facebook could have stopped the 10.1 billion estimated views of misinformation from top-performing pages on its site.

Causality is difficult to prove retroactively, but there is little debate over the threat that misinformation poses to democracies. In its annual Global Risk Report for 2024, the World Economic Forum ranked misinformation and disinformation as the most severe global threat anticipated over the next two years.

The challenges that misinformation poses to national elections in the U.S. will be different in 2024 than they were in 2020. Facebook still dominates, but the rise of TikTok’s popularity and the proliferation of deep fake content on the platform, as the The New York Times has reported, could exacerbate existing harms.

Organizations like the News Literacy Project have been hard at work trying to arm consumers — especially young people — with the knowledge needed to be discerning social media users. TikTok has also detailed its plan to mitigate the spread of online misinformation in advance of the 2024 European elections, which might offer a glimpse of the platform’s strategy for the U.S. elections later in the year.

Most intriguing perhaps is the forthcoming accord that tech giants are planning to release jointly at the Munich Security Conference on February 16, 2024, according to reporting from Politico.

The draft, shared with Politico, reads, “We affirm that the protection of electoral integrity and public trust is a shared responsibility and a common good that transcends partisan interests and national borders.”

Whether this accord has the teeth to mitigate social media interference in forthcoming elections around the world is yet to be seen.