Social media is vast, with several distinct sites and innumerable accounts spread across them. Because of this complexity, researchers cast a wide net across the most popular sites to create an inclusive list of influencers who discuss news.
First, we developed a set of keywords related to current events and civic issues across 45 topics that were relevant to broad audiences in the U.S. in early 2024. Then we used a set of social media marketing tools to find social media accounts with over 100,000 followers that used those keywords in early 2024. While the keywords used were focused on issues important to the United States, we could not verify the location of the individuals running these accounts.
One thing quickly became clear: Discussion of news, politics and civic issues is widespread on social media. This initial screening led to a list of more than 28,000 accounts across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube.
Many of these 28,000 accounts are not focused on news most of the time. Researchers examined recent posts from each account to determine if they were talking about news, politics and civic issues regularly, and not just rarely. We also verified that accounts were run by individuals and not organizations. Just over 2,500 accounts – and 2,058 influencers, since influencers can have an account on multiple sites – met these criteria.
To create a more manageable group to analyze, researchers then sampled 500 news influencers from this set of 2,058.1 These 500 form the set of popular news influencers who are examined in this report. Our analysis includes:
- Detailed human coding of all 500 news influencers to determine where they post and who they are. This includes a look at other places they may post beyond the five major sites we searched for influencers on.
- Human-validated machine coding of over 100,000 posts from these news influencers during three weeks in July and August 2024, to determine what these accounts are posting about.
For more information, refer to the methodology.
Where are news influencers found?
While news influencers can be found on a wide range of social media sites, they are concentrated on a few. The vast majority of news influencers studied (85%) have an account on X, formerly known as Twitter. Half are on Instagram, while a slightly smaller share (44%) are on YouTube.
Roughly three-in-ten are on Facebook (32%), Threads (30%) and TikTok (27%). And smaller shares are on several other sites, including 5% who are on Donald Trump’s site, Truth Social.2 (A 2022 study found that most prominent accounts on Truth Social were individuals.)
More Americans say they regularly get news (in general, not just from news influencers) from Facebook (33%) and YouTube (32%) than other social media sites, while smaller shares get news on Instagram (20%), TikTok (17%) and X (12%). At the same time, a much larger share of X users than users of other sites say getting news is a reason they use the site.
Altogether, about two-thirds of news influencers are on more than one social media site, including 27% who are on five or more sites. Meanwhile, 34% are on just one site – most often X.
Other ways news influencers connect with their audiences
We also looked at other ways that news influencers connect with their audiences beyond social media. About a third (34%) host a podcast, and nearly a quarter (22%) send an email newsletter to subscribers. A small share of news influencers in the sample (6%) have an official Discord server, a chat site on which they can often have private, ongoing chats with fans.
Most news influencers (59%) also make direct financial appeals to their followers. About half (49%) offer a paid subscription to their content, 29% solicit donations, and 21% sell branded merchandise like stickers, coffee mugs and apparel.
