Political Leaning of Most U.S. News Influencers Might Surprise You
Movieguide® Contributor
A new report by Pew Research and the Knight Foundation reveals that social media news influencers are more likely to lean conservative than liberal.
“Titled ‘America’s News Influencers,’ the report is based on a survey of 10,000 US adults, as well as an analysis of 500 ‘news influencers,’” Engadget reported. “Pew defined the latter group as ‘individuals who regularly post about current events and civic issues on social media and have at least 100,000 followers’ on Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok or YouTube.’”
The report found that 20% of U.S. adults look to influencers for news. Those aged 18 to 29 use influencers for news at a higher rate of 37%.
“News influencers have emerged as one of the key alternatives to traditional outlets as a news and information source for a lot of people, especially younger folks. And these influencers have really reached new levels of attention and prominence this year amid the presidential election,” said Galen Stocking, senior computational social scientist at the Pew Research Center. “We thought it was really important to look at who is behind some of the most popular accounts — the ones that aren’t news organizations, but actual people.”
According to the report, news influencers are more likely to be men and just “slightly” more likely to be Republicans than Democrats.
When it comes to their audience, “There’s no partisan split,” said Stocking. “Republicans and Democrats are saying they’re getting news regularly from news influencers at roughly the same rate.”
“Pew’s researchers did, however, uncover some notable differences between platforms,” Engadget reported. “While most of the 500 influencers they studied were active on multiple platforms, X was by far the most popular with 85 percent of influencers having a presence on the platform formerly known as Twitter. News influencers on X were also more likely to ‘explicitly identify with the political right (28 percent) than the left (21 percent).’”
News influencers on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram also had higher percentages of right-leaning identities compared to the left. TikTok was the only platform in the study that had more news influencers who lean toward the left. It also had the most female influencers at 45%.
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Out of the 500 influencers studied, 23% are or had been employed in the news industry and were more likely to have political bias.
“While the report doesn’t attempt to unpack what the greater share of conservative voices may mean, Stocking points out that the social media users surveyed by Pew also expressed some differences in how they perceive the content shared by news influencers,” Engadget said.
“There’s actually a pretty interesting gap where the moderates within the parties are less likely to say that it helps them better understand current events,” Stocking said.
Right-leaning posts consistently outperform left-leaning posts on Facebook, according to a Media Matters report, and the University of Pennsylvania researchers found that left-leaning news is prominent on X.
This all indicates that social media companies are not largely censoring conservative voices, which is the opposite of what many Republicans believe.
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