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• Among the news influencers in our sample, men outnumber women by a roughly two-to-one margin: 63% of influencers are men, compared with 30% who are women. (The remainder either are nonbinary or their gender could not be determined by researchers.)
• Many Republicans have
  • Gender: TikTok has the smallest gender gap: 50% of news influencers on TikTok are men, while 45% are women. On all other sites, men outnumber women by a roughly two-to-one margin or more.
  • Political 0rientation: TikTok also stands out as the only site of the five where news influencers who explicitly identify as right-leaning (25% of TikTok news influencers) do not outnumber those who publicly express a left-leaning political ideology (28%).
  • Values and identities: News influencers on TikTok are more likely than those on other sites to show support for LGBTQ+ rights or identify as LGBTQ+ in their account profiles (13%).

  How are news influencers who have worked for news organizations different from those who haven't?

  News influencers largely offer independent voices from outside the news media. About three-quarters of news influencers (77%) have no past or present affiliation with a news media organization, while 23% have been employed in the news industry in some way.

  How we define 'news organization affiliation'

  Researchers categorized all news influencers based on whether they are currently or were previously employed by a news organization (or freelancers who regularly contributed to news organizations).

  The list of news organizations that people in this category work for (or used to work for) is broad, ranging from long-standing newspapers to cable news channels to newer digital outlets. News organizations are defined as all outlets with a staff and multiple bylines. Researchers considered affiliated influencers to have this background regardless of their news organization's political orientation, audience size or primary publishing method (digital, TV, print, etc.).

  Those in the latter category include influencers who are currently affiliated with any news outlet (digital, TV, print, etc.), those who formerly worked in the news industry before becoming an independent influencer, and freelancers who have regularly contributed to news organizations.

  

  • News influencers with a news organization affiliation are less likely to express a clear political orientation: 64% have no expressed political stance, compared with 44% of those who have never worked for a news organization.
  • When they do explicitly identify with a political orientation, news influencers with links to a news outlet tend to be right-leaning. A quarter (25%) say they are conservative, Republican or pro-Trump, while just 9% are liberal, Democratic, or pro-Harris or pro-Biden. Among news influencers with no links to a news outlet, roughly equal shares express a right-leaning (27%) and left-leaning (25%) stance.
  • News influencers who are or were affiliated with a news organization also are less likely to identify with specific values and identities – for example, to indicate they are pro-LGBTQ+ or support Palestinians.
  • Nearly all news influencers who have a news organization affiliation (96%) are on X, compared with a smaller majority of news influencers without that background (82%). In contrast, news influencers without a news industry affiliation are more likely than those with links to the news industry to have accounts on video-based sites like YouTube and TikTok, and also are more likely to monetize their content through subscriptions, donations or merchandise.

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  News influencers post about a wide range of topics. In fact, most of the posts by the news influencers in our sample during the three weeks (57%) could not be directly tied to current events or civic issues. (This may in part be a result of examining each post out of context, and not including images in the analysis.)

  Some of the key findings from looking at the 43% of the posts that were confirmed to be about current events or civic issues:

  • Among the posts that referenced current events or civic issues, more than half (55%) were about politics, government or the presidential election. This includes posts that were specifically about the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump (5%), the Democratic National Convention (4%), the Republican National Convention (3%) or President Joe Biden's withdrawal from the race (2%). For most news influencers (58%), politics, government or the election was the most common post topic.
  • Beyond U.S. politics in general, 18% of posts focused on social issues, including race, LGBTQ+ issues and abortion. A similar share of posts (14%) were about international issues, including the Israel-Hamas war (7%).
  • The posts each week reflect the events going on at the time. Posts from July 15 to 21 were more likely than other weeks to be about the first assassination attempt on Trump on July 13 (10% of posts), the RNC, held from July 15 to 18 (6%), and Biden dropping out of the race on July 21 (5%). And posts from Aug. 19 to 25 were especially likely to be about the DNC, which was held that week (11%).
  • Across all weeks, there was some variation across sites in which topics were discussed more or less often. For instance, the Israel-Hamas war was discussed more on Instagram than any other site (14% of Instagram posts, followed by 8% of X posts), while U.S. politics was a less common topic on Instagram than other sites. Politics and the election were discussed in a particularly high share of posts on YouTube (68%).

  Jump to the full analysis of topics being discussed by news influencers.

  Other Pew Research Center studies on social media

  This study is the latest in our ongoing investigation into the news and information Americans are seeing on social media.

  For our related research, read:

  • Social media and news fact sheet
  • How Americans get news and navigate politics on social media
  • The news environment on YouTube
  • The role of alternative social media in the news and information ecosystem
  • The landscape of information, entertainment and politics on Twitter and TikTok

  The rest of this report looks at these findings in greater detail. One section dives into the opinions and experiences of Americans who regularly get news from influencers. Others include a brief overview of how we created the list of news influencers and where they are posting content, an analysis of their gender and political orientation, and an overview of the differences between news influencers who have worked for news organizations and those who have not.

  Finally, one section looks in more detail at the topics discussed by news influencers, and five additional sections profile news influencers on each of the major sites studied: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) and YouTube.