Veel meer Amerikanen dan twee jaar geleden halen hun nieuws van Twitter en Facebook, blijkt uit onderzoek van PEW Resaearch Center. Twitter is by far het populairst voor brekend nieuws – ruim de helft van de ondervraagden zegt hier het nieuws as it happens vandaan te halen.
These findings come at a time when the two social media platforms are increasing their emphasis on news. Twitter is soon set to unveil its long-rumored news feature, “Project Lightning.” The feature will allow anyone, whether they are a Twitter user or not, to view a feed of tweets, images and videos about live events as they happen, curated by a bevy of new employees with “newsroom experience.” And, in early 2015, Twitter purchased and launched the live video-streaming app Periscope, further highlighting their focus on providing information about live events as they happen. Meanwhile, in May, Facebook launched Instant Articles, a trial project that allows media companies to publish stories directly to the Facebook platform instead of linking to outside sites, and, in late June, Facebook started introducing its “Trending” sidebar to allow users to filter by topic and see only trending news about politics, science and technology, sports or entertainment.
Facebookgebruikers posten meer dan Twittergebruikers commentaren op nieuws.
About one-third of Facebook users (32%) say they post about government and politics on Facebook, and 28% comment on these types of posts. That compares to a quarter of Twitter users (25%) who tweet about this news topic and 13% who reply to tweets on this topic posted by others. But following news outlets directly is more common on Twitter.About half (46%) of Twitter users follow news organizations, reporters or commentators, compared with about three-in-ten (28%) of Facebook users.