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For Thursday’s Chart of the Day, we explore the growing importance of social media as a source of news content.
Beyond staying in touch with friends and filling up spare time, keeping up with news/current affairs is in fact the most important motivation for using social media across GWI’s 34 markets. 4 in 10 internet users cite this globally, with those in LatAm and the Middle East & Africa being particularly enthusiastic about getting their news from social platforms.
These attitudes are having an impact on behaviors at a platform-specific level. In particular, Twitter’s role as a news aggregating network shines through: half of Twitter users say they gather news from social media (putting them ahead of Facebookers and Snapchatters), while reading a news story is now the most popular Twitter activity among those tracked by GWI.
