Meet Your New News Channel: Twitter
Many Americans are familiar with news sources such as CNN, FNC, MSNBC, and more. These media giants have dominated the cable news industry since their founding in the 1980's. However, that might change sooner than later. A 2016 study from Pew Research claims that 62% of people get their news from social media, with 18 percent doing so ‘very often’.
Facebook is the clear leader in social media news, with 44% of U.S. adults using it to stay up to date on news. Nevertheless, Twitter is rapidly catching up. Twitter’s average active userbase went from 255 million in the first quarter of 2014 to 328 million in the first quarter of 2017.
Many celebrities and politicians also use Twitter as their channel to speak to the general public. Pope Francis is very active on Twitter, tweeting every day in 9 different languages. The White House is another account that constantly tweets to its 14+ million followers more than once daily. However, a very notable example is multi-billionaire United States President Donald J. Trump. Even since the start of the 2016 U.S. election, Twitter has been the go-to platform for the 45th president to share information — while undermining the media.
President Trump has been very vocal about what he thinks about the press, stating that the media is the “enemy of the American people.” He has also said that “My Twitter has become so powerful that I can actually make my enemies tell the truth.”
The cable news industry is more likely to crash now than ever before due to “fake news”. The phrase, popularized by President Trump, describes the media often reporting on fabricated events. A poll conducted during the first week of March, found that 60% of respondents believe that news outlets reported fake news either regularly or occasionally, and 40% said that they believed traditional news outlets reported fake news purposely to push an agenda.
Evidently, more than half of the people surveyed don’t trust the usual cable news outlets to report real news. Twitter, on the other hand, is more genuine. Twitter enables people to speak their own words to the public. With typical cable news outlets starting to decline, Twitter might be our new source to find news.
