The Data is In: Twitter is the Most Used Social Media Platform by Journalists

Social media is changing public life. Gone are the days of Facebook Notes, quizzes, and tag games – nowadays, social media often serves as the source of people’s news and sparks debates across wide swaths of space and ideology. A staggering 94 percent of journalists report that they use social media for their job. Most regard it as a sourcing technique, a place to recover primary sources, or else to be able to follow a string of reliable secondary sources until they find a primary source. 

Twitter is far and away the most preferred news source among journalists. 64 percent of journalists surveyed by the Pew Research Center say they turn to Twitter for their news, whereas a study from 2019 put that number at 83 percent. The reason? There are a number of tools available that make Twitter a really accessible and worthwhile option. For example, Twitter allows the use of geocoding, which is useful on breaking news stories because entering the coordinates in Twitter’s search bar will track other tweets being made in real time. This naturally increases the pool of primary sources available to journalists covering breaking work.

This preference for Twitter gets more pronounced when you factor in ages; journalists under the age of 30 overwhelmingly identified Twitter as the site they go to for their news and sourcing: some 83%. 77 percent of journalists ages 30 - 49 also preferred Twitter, whereas only 45 percent of journalists over the age of 65 said the same. The data also shows slight partisan leanings. 77 percent of journalists who work for left-leaning publications said they went to Twitter as their first source of news on social media, but only 66 percent of journalists who work for right-leaning publications said the same.

However, the public does not mirror journalists’ preference for getting their news on Twitter, or indeed, on social media at all. In fact, only 48 percent of adults said they turned to social media for news, with 31 percent of those people preferring to get their news from Facebook. Twitter was their third most preferred platform at 13 percent. 

Now that Twitter has become so reputable in journalism, several guides exist on how best to utilize Twitter so that journalists can engage audiences, create content, and continue their pursuit for the truth. However, as with any privatized social media, Twitter’s information is not fully free without censorship or control, and cognitive biases. Awareness of the advantages and also the pitfalls of Twitter are a necessary for integrating it into journalistic practice.