Over 60% US citizens get their news from social media

Social media has left behind traditional media as a source for news, according to a new study published on Thursday by Pew Research Center.

Pew surveyed more than 4,600 people who said they were increasingly using their favorite social media platforms - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and even Snapchat - as their go-to sources for news. According to the study, News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2016, 62 per cent of US citizens now got news from social media.

Proportionally, Facebook, with 222 million monthly active users across the US and Canada (1.6 billion worldwide), was the No 1 go-to source for news among  social media sites. The study revealed that 66 per cent of Facebook's US audience got their news from the site.

According to commentators, it was an interesting and timely stat, considering the social network's Trending Topics controversy.

The social network had recently come under fire with former Trends contractors alleging they might have been filtering out some right-leaning news sources. Facebook denied the accusations, but ultimately changed how it filtered Trending Topics.

Reddit has the largest percentage of users who said they turned to it for news (70 per cent), but its user base was much, much smaller than Facebook's.

According o the study two-thirds of Facebook's userbase read their news on the platform, with 59 per cent of Twitter users getting news on Twitter, and 70 per cent of Reddit users doing the same with their respective platform.

Considering the difference in size of these user groups - Facebook reached 67 per cent of the adult US population while Twitter only reached 16 per cent, which put Facebook on top with 44 per cent of the population getting news from the network.

Twitter and YouTube come in second with about 10 per cent of the population getting news on those platforms.