What Social Media Platforms Are Latinos Using To Get Their News?

Half of all adults in the United States get their news from social media, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center. The survey also delves in Latinos' patterns of consumption, showing that most of them regularly use Facebook and YouTube to consume these type of content.

Concretely, the survey shows that 38 percent of all Hispanic respondents said they get their news regularly from Facebook, while 35 percent uses YouTube.

Not far behind, 29 percent uses Instagram for this purpose and 25 percent uses TikTok, a platform in which news consumption from all demographics has skyrocketed in the past year.

Moreover, 15 percent said they use X, formerly known as Twitter, while the rest of the platforms included in the survey (LinkedIn, Snapchat and Reddit among them) didn't get two digits from this demographic.

The percentages mentioned for Latinos were above average, considering that figures for Facebook, YouTube and Instagram for the overall population were 30, 26 and 16 percent, respectively.

Another salient data point from the study is the fact that most of the main social media platforms showed a decline in the percentage of respondents who used them regularly for news. It went from 59 to 53 percent for X, 54 to 43 percent for Facebook and 42 to 38 percent for Reddit. YouTube remained steady with 32 percent.

In contrast, the only ones which saw an increase were Instagram, which went from 28 to 34 percent, and TikTok, which surged from 22 to 43 percent.

Latinos are avid users of TikTok. According to a study by the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in the U.S. (USHCC) and marketing agency Chemistry Cultura, the members of this demographic who use it do so more frequently than the average: 48 percent of them said they use it daily compared to 36 percent overall.

At a general level, the Pew study also found gender differences: "Women make up a greater portion of regular news consumers on Nextdoor (66 percent), Facebook (62 percent), Instagram (59 percent) and TikTok (58 percent), while men make up a greater share on sites like Reddit (67 percent), X (62 percent) and YouTube (58 percent)."

There are also partisan differences: "The majority of regular news consumers on many sites are Democrats or lean Democratic. No social media site included here has regular news consumers who are more likely to be Republicans or lean Republican, though there is no significant partisan difference among news consumers on Facebook, X or Nextdoor," it concluded.