Where do you get most of your news from these days? Back in the day it would most likely be the newspaper, and then there were internet portals/front pages that would contain news, the weather, sports scores, and so on, but these days social media does seem to be a popular source for many.
A recent study from the Knight Foundation has revealed that Facebook continues to lead as being the number one source amongst college students, which isn’t all that surprising. However coming in second place might actually be a surprise for some, and if you’re thinking that Twitter is second, apparently it isn’t and according to the study 55% of college students say that Snapchat is also where they get their news from.
Interestingly enough Twitter isn’t even in third place. That honor goes to YouTube, followed by Instagram, and Twitter, at 54%, 51%, and 42% respectively. In a way this doesn’t come as a surprise as Snapchat is popular amongst the younger generation. Snap had initially tried to redesign its app to make it easier to use, especially amongst the older population, but it kind of backfired as Snapchat’s existing users seemed to really dislike the changes.
That being said, social media as a source of news has its advantages where news can spread quickly, but the downside is that in this day and age where we’re seeing a lot of sharing of unverified sources and false information, sometimes spreading too quickly is actually a bad thing.