About seven-in-ten Twitter users in the United States (69%) say they get news or news headlines on the platform. And most of these news consumers think the news they get there is at least somewhat accurate and that the amount of news is about right.
Two-thirds of Twitter news consumers have at least some trust in the accuracy of the information they get on the platform – including 7% who have a great deal of trust – while a third say they have “not much” or no trust at all in it. This finding is in contrast with earlier research about social media more broadly, which found that 59% of Americans who use any social media platform for news expect the news they get there to be “largely inaccurate.”
Again, roughly two-thirds of Twitter news consumers are satisfied with the volume of news they get on the platform: 67% say they like the amount of news there is on Twitter, compared with 32% who say they are worn out by the amount of news on the platform.
A much smaller portion of Twitter news consumers see Twitter as their central source of news. Just 8% of these news consumers say Twitter is the most important way they keep up with news, but the majority (59%) say it is an important – but not the most important way – they get news. About a third of Twitter users who get news there (32%) say it is not an important part of their news diet.
Similarly, most Twitter news consumers (62%) say they at least sometimes see news stories there they wouldn’t have seen elsewhere, including 15% who say they often see these types of stories. A little more than a third (37%) say they hardly ever or never see unique news on the platform.
When it comes to breaking news, Twitter is a common source for many of its news consumers. Seven-in-ten Twitter news consumers say they have used Twitter to follow live news events, compared with about three-in-ten (29%) who have not. This has increased slightly since 2015, when 59% of Twitter news consumers said they used the platform to follow breaking news.
