Politics Online

Most Americans say the U.S. government and technology companies should each take steps to restrict false information and extremely violent content online.

More than 44 million #BlackLivesMatter tweets from nearly 10 million distinct users currently exist on Twitter today. Over half of all existing tweets that include the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag were posted from May to September 2020.

True crime is the most common topic, making up 24% of top-ranked podcasts; 15% of the top podcasts focus on news. The next most common topics are politics and government (10%); entertainment, pop culture and the arts (9%); and self-help and relationships (8%).

Today, 51% of U.S. adults say they support the Black Lives Matter movement – down from 67% in June 2020. A majority of Americans say the increased focus on race and racial inequality in the past three years hasn't led to improvement for Black Americans.

23% of the prominent accounts on the seven alternative social media sites studied sought financial support from their audiences in June 2022.

With Musk at the helm, here are four facts about how adult Twitter users in the United States are using the site.

Since Elon Musk's take over of Twitter, Republican users have more positive views of the site, while those of Democratic users are more negative.

Roughly half of U.S. adults say they have listened to a podcast in the past year, including one-in-five who report listening at least a few times a week. Most podcast listeners say this experience includes hearing news, which they largely expect to be mostly accurate. Large shares of listeners say they turn to podcasts for entertainment, learning or having something to listen to while doing something else.

About one-in-ten U.S. adults have heard of Gab, an alternative social media site, and 1% say that they get news there regularly.

74% of Republicans say social media has been more of a bad thing for U.S. democracy, compared with a smaller majority of Democrats (57%).