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Pew Research Center surveyed more than 500 adults in the U.S. to learn how they engage with news they see on Twitter and how those behaviors have changed since a similar study in 2015.
The think tank found that 83% of respondents tweeted about news at least once during the study’s 11-week run, but most did so on a relatively infrequent basis, with 55% tweeting about news between one and nine times during the period.
The three top subject areas, unchanged since the 2015 study, were entertainment, politics and sports.
Pew said the average U.S. adult Twitter user focused on entertainment in 29% of their news-related tweets, compared with 28% in 2015.
The same was not true for government and politics, which accounted for 26% of news-related tweets this year versus 17% in 2015.
Conversely, sports was the topic of 12% of 2021 tweets, down from 25% in 2015.
The pandemic was mentioned in 17% of news-related tweets, including the virus itself, vaccines or related issues such as mask mandates or travel restrictions.
Finally, 37% of news-related tweets in 2021 included opinions from the author, down slightly from 39% in 2015.
Pew wrote in the introduction to its study, “This analysis looks at news-related tweets from all users who tweeted at least once during the study period, regardless of whether they tweeted only a few times during that span or whether they tweeted more than 1,000 times. In other words, while other studies by the Center have shown that a small number of users produce the vast majority of tweets posted by U.S. adults, this analysis focuses on the behavior of the average user, regardless of their tweet frequency.”
