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Journalism experts weigh in on what this means for the news media
Social media is the most commonly reported news source among college students, according to a nationwide survey of nearly 63,000 college students.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and College Pulse surveyed 62,997 undergraduate students at 262 four-year colleges and universities for its annual 2027 College Free Speech Rankings. The survey asked students about a range of topics, including where they get their news – and 87 percent chose social media.
Students were asked whether they get their news from several different sources meaning respondents could answer “yes” to multiple sources.
The next most popular source of news is television, with 44 percent of students selecting this option, followed by 36 percent choosing online newspapers. However, only six percent said they read print newspapers.
Another 22 percent reported getting news from podcasts, 13 percent from radio, and 12 percent from radio or television websites.
But while college students are interested in what is going on nationally or at the state level, fewer are reading their own campus newspaper. The survey found 17 percent of students read their campus newspaper online, while nine percent said they read print student newspapers.
The prevalence of social media as a news source is not surprising to journalism professors, but they caution that the format can affect how students encounter and understand information.
“I routinely ask my students where they get their news from, social media is there at the top,” Mariano Castillo, a journalism professor at Texas A&M University, told The College Fix via email.
Castillo said social media can make it difficult for students to encounter the full context of a story.
“We live in a world of nuance, and short social media posts often miss that nuance,” Castillo said. “Part of it is the format itself, things like limits to how long a video can be or length of a post.”
A researcher and professor who studies social media and news consumption said he was not surprised by the results.
Pennsylvania State University Professor Shyam Sundar raised concerns that students may not be getting the full picture of the story if they only receive news through headlines or short posts.
“Encountering news in this way, and via short X posts or Tikok videos robs the news consumer of much-needed context and background,” Sundar said. He said many students interact with the news incidentally and now through deliberate subscriptions.
“Our research shows that over 75% of news links that we encounter on Facebook are forwarded to use by our contacts who have not themselves clicked on them,” Sundar told The Fix via email. “So, a lot of our news traffic is based on superficial information gleaned from headlines.”
However, Yiping Xia, a Texas A&M professor whose research examines how people engage with news and how disinformation spreads online, said the format alone does not determine whether information is reliable or informative.
“A short but factual, well-informed post (or video) on social media might prove to inform the student better than a longer article published by a biased source,” Xia told The Fix via email.
Xia said news organizations seeking to reach college students should adapt their content to the platforms students already use rather than simply reposting links to longer stories.
For traditional news organizations, reaching college students may increasingly mean finding ways to combine social media’s accessibility with the context of longer-form journalism.
Castillo, the Texas A&M professor, said cost can also be an obstacle for students, as much high-quality journalism is behind paywalls.
Lowering those barriers, he said, could help news organizations reach younger audiences and eventually build relationships with future subscribers.
The survey also collected demographic information about students’ political ideology. Fifty percent of respondents identified as very or slightly liberal, 18 percent identified as very or slightly conservative and 13 percent described themselves as middle of the road.
Those figures describe the political makeup of the students surveyed and are separate from the survey’s questions about news consumption.
FIRE’s research also found varying degrees of LGBTQ identification, with 86 percent of Mount Holyoke College students identifying as non-heterosexual.
Around 31 percent of college students said violence could be acceptable in some circumstances to stop campus speech.
