According to a recent study in the US, younger people are sourcing most of their information about daily goings on from social media.
As opposed to the baby boomer generation, which was found to get 60% of its news from local TV stations, 61% of American millennials were heading to Facebook for political information, according to the Pew Research Center for Journalism and Media.
However, some have commentated that with an ever-growing number of people logging on to social news feeds to catch up on general affairs, an increasing amount of power is being put into the hands of the online companies, such as Facebook and Twitter.
Fortune noted that due to the way news algorithms are set up on social sites, it could mean whole generations are not being given access to certain information that may be of interest to them.
The millennial group, which was categorised in the study as people aged between 18 and 33, also ranked highest for using Google News to find information, at 33%. This showed that new consumers are quite at home when it comes to using online resources to discover details about the topics that they are interested in.
The randomly selected sample of American adults was split into three categories: millennials, generation X (aged 34-49) and baby boomers (50-68). The analysis discarded the results of those aged 69-86, the so-called ‘silent’ generation, due to its statistically low internet usage. It was discovered that the use of social media to find news was more prevalent amongst the younger groups, with 51% of generation X and 39% of baby boomers doing so.
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