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Nearly one-half of U.S. adults responding to a recent study by Pew Research Center said they get at least some news on Covid-19 vaccines from social networking platforms, but just 6% considered those platforms to be the most important way to get such news.
The think tank conducted its survey from July 26 through Aug. 8, and it found that 30% of respondents get some vaccine news from social media and 18% get a lot, while 51% said they don’t get much vaccine news from those platforms or get none at all.
Pew said 60% of respondents believe social media is not an important way to keep up with news about Covid-19 vaccines, while 33% said it is important but not the most important way.
Among the 53% of respondents who said they regularly get news from at least one of the 10 platforms Pew asked about, 43% said they have gotten some news and information about vaccines from those social networks, and 30% have gotten a lot.
From that same group, 61% believe social media is an important way to keep up with news about the vaccines, but just 11% feel that it is the most important way to do so.
By platform, 40% of people who regularly get news on Instagram said they have been getting a lot of news and information related to the vaccine via social media, and the same was true for 39% who said they regularly get news from Snapchat.
This also applied to roughly one-third of respondents who get news from Twitter, Facebook or TikTok, and for roughly three out of 10 of those doing so from LinkedIn, YouTube and Reddit.
Not enough people rely on WhatsApp or Twitch for news for Pew to analyze their responses.
Removing WhatsApp and Twitch from the equation, 60% or more of respondents who regularly get news from the other eight platforms in the study said social media was an important way of keeping up with vaccine news, led by Snapchat (79%), TikTok (77%) and Instagram (75%).
By age and gender, younger Americans and women were more likely than older Americans and men to get vaccine-related news and information from social media and consider it an important source of that news.
Pew wrote in a blog post Tuesday, “The ultimate reach of Covid-19 vaccine information on social media is also impacted by the share of Americans who use each site for news. For example, while 31% of Americans say they turn to Facebook for news, just 4% turn to Snapchat for news.”
