Is Social Media Really to Blame? Young Adults and Voting Intentions in 2024

Social scientists find that a nontrivial portion of young adults, get their news and political information from social media. Despite this important insight, scholars often fail to distinguish content users seek out from content that is fed to them. We obtained a nationally representative sample of 1,000 U.S. residents ages 18 to 29 examining their preferred news medium and voting intentions. Using a two-way ANOVA, we examined the effect of primary news media (e.g., traditional news vs algorithmically driven social media) and political ideology on voter intention. We found a significant relationship between primary news medium and voting intention, such that individuals who indicated getting their news primarily from traditional news sources (on or offline), as opposed to social media, expressed greater voting intention. These findings suggest that the source of news is related to young adults' voting intention when examined with a nuanced conceptualization of “traditional” versus “social” media.