• Research presented by Pew Research Center finds that most Americans are still getting their news from traditional news outlets and journalists.
• Even on X, users prefer to follow authoritative and trustworthy voices to get accurate, relevant news.
• TikTok is emerging as a way for folks to find news they likely wouldn’t have seen elsewhere.

Legacy media is the big bad boogie man Elon Musk hopes to upend with X, but as it turns out, most users still trust news outlets and journalists to get their news.When Musk talks about “legacy media” he’s referring to established publications with trained journalists manning the bull pen.

Publications such as The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and others are generally lumped together under this term which is used in a derogatory fashion in a bid to get X users to follow citizen journalists, influencers and other pundits on his platform.

Unfortunately for Musk, folks still hold the role of journalists and their publications in somewhat high regard. Results from a study conducted by Pew Research Center found that 80 percent of Americans get their news from news outlets and journalists they follow on the X platform. In contrast just 49 percent say they get news from influencers or celebrities and 46 percent say they get news from advocacy and non-profit organisations.

This is great news for X except, it may not be.

Pew Research Center reports that 86 percent of the X users it surveyed says they sometimes see news on X that is inaccurate. Meanwhile 37 percent reported seeing inaccurate news extremely or fairly often.

Things get muddy though when Pew separates users based on political affiliations.

“X news consumers who identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party are more likely than their Republican or GOP-leaning counterparts to say they often see inaccurate news on the platform (42% vs. 31%),” writes Pew.

Whether this is down to X and Musk being seen as leaning toward the right-wing is unclear but Democrats do tend to be more sceptical of the news they see on X.

The Musk owned platform then remains a source of news in the world but as Pew points out, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are also sources for news, although not the primary reason folks use those platforms.

That’s bad news for X because 43 percent of users surveyed say that they sometimes feel worn out by the constant stream of news on their feeds. This may eventually push folks away from the platform, especially if the news cycle gets even more depressing.

As regards TikTok, it’s fast becoming a popular source for news in the US with the majority of adult users Pew surveyed searching for news on the platform and growing number of youngsters doing the same. The sticking point here is that TikTok may not exist in the US by January 2025 as the government tries to get it to sell to a US entity or face a ban.

TikTok also appears to expose users to news they wouldn’t have seen on another platform while Facebook is generally where folks find news they’ve already seen elsewhere.

The crux of Pew’s findings are that Americans are finding news across multiple platforms and the disappearance of one platform is unlikely to make it impossible to find news. This is simply a result of social media existing.

Using ourselves as an example, we post our stories to every social media platform we can as it’s the best way to maximise reach. We’d wager that every news outlet worth it’s salt does the same and few, if any at all limit their posts to one platform.

We suspect the same could be said for the rest of the world except regions where there are laws that force social media platforms to share revenue with publications that post on their platforms such as in Canada.