Americans don’t trust social media information

Americans don’t really prefer their news from social media, and those who do- don’t really trust what they’re getting, according to the new data from Pew Research that was published on Thursday. The study that analyzed the news consumption habits of American adults found that only 38 percent of U.S. adults get news online often, and just 18 percent of American adults get news from social media often.

The research organization also found that the vast majority of people don’t trust what they read on social media. Just 4 percent of internet-using U.S. adults trust social media information “a lot” and 30 percent trust it “some.” Meanwhile, 32 percent trust it “not at all” and 33 percent trust it “not too much.”

Those numbers include people who don’t actually get information on social media, maybe because they don’t find it trustworthy, but trust is hard to come by even for adults who do use social sites for news. Of adults who turn to social media for news, only 7 percent trust that information “a lot.”

Interestingly and unfortunately, trust in the media isn’t high anywhere. Barely 18 percent of respondents trust national news organizations “a lot” and just 22 percent trust local news organizations. Still, for both of those groups, around 80 percent trust it at least “some.”

The lack of trust factor is a wake-up call for many media companies with most of them distributing its news via social media. And some new media companies like BuzzFeed and Bleacher Report all but forgo homepages and rely on the likes of Facebook and Twitter as key traffic drivers. A perception that social media isn’t a great place to get reliable information is indeed bad ‘news’ for everyone in the media world.