Young Americans Still Use (and Rely On) Facebook
Winter 2020
Based on our research, it’s time to put to rest the conventional wisdom that causes can ignore Facebook because young Americans (18-30) don’t use the platform.
According to our data in March, 42% of those who got their COVID-19 news from a non-news source cited Facebook, compared to Twitter at 22% and Instagram at 15%. Facebook still led in May, when those figures were 35%, 20% and 20%, respectively. In June, with the start of the movement for racial equity, a third (33%) said they most frequently obtained news about racial inequality via a social media site that shares or discusses the news, with 34% of those citing Facebook, 22% Twitter and 22% Instagram.
Finally, ads on social media had the most influence on young Americans’ election-related actions; our research revealed more than a third of our sample acted in response to an ad on social media － most likely Facebook, as ads there reach 32% of the people in the world (including 1.21 billion ages 13-34, half the platform’s monthly users). Similarly, Pew found in January 2019 that 79% of this age group was using Facebook.
