Aaron Smith

Although health providers are the most common place Americans turn for information about their health, social media influencers and podcasts also play a major role. This is especially true for young women: 57% of women ages 18 to 29 say they ever get health and wellness information from influencers.

As today’s parents navigate the challenges of raising a child, many are turning to online spaces where fellow parents share their experiences. One such space is the r/Parenting community on Reddit. It is the largest community for parents on the site, with more than 8 million members as of November 2025. To better understand the discussions about parenting that take place online, we examined six months of user submissions and comments on the r/Parenting subreddit. We also conducted a survey of U.S.

A new Pew Research Center analysis of the accounts Americans follow on TikTok highlights the centrality of internet-native content creators, prominent influencers and traditional celebrities on the popular short-form video platform.

In July 2013, activists first used the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag to spark conversation about racism, violence and the criminal justice system following George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. Ten years later, Black Lives Matter stands as a model of a new generation of social movements intrinsically linked to social media.

In recent years, several new options have emerged in the social media universe, many of which explicitly present themselves as alternatives to more established social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – especially by opposing free speech restrictions they say are rife at those sites. These newer sites have created a small but satisfied community of news consumers, many of whom say one of the major reasons they are there is to stay informed about current events.

What is the internet? And who is an internet user? The questions may seem straightforward, but more than a decade of research in the United States and abroad suggests that some people who use the internet may not be aware that they’re doing so. Results from recent Pew Research Center surveys in the US and 11 emerging economies show that confusion about what the internet stems from two different – but related – sources. First, many people who use smartphones are unaware that the apps and browsers on their devices involve using the internet.

After more than a decade of studying the spread and impact of digital life in the United States, Pew Research Center has intensified its exploration of the impact of online connectivity among populations in emerging economies – where the prospect of swift and encompassing cultural change propelled by digital devices might be even more dramatic than the effects felt in developed societies.

At a broad level, 58% of Americans feel that computer programs will always reflect some level of human bias – although 40% think these programs can be designed in a way that is bias-free. And in various contexts, the public worries that these tools might violate privacy, fail to capture the nuance of complex situations, or simply put the people they are evaluating in an unfair situation. Public perceptions of algorithmic decision-making are also often highly contextual.

A majority of Americans across a wide range of demographic groups are YouTube adopters, with younger Americans standing out as especially avid users of the site. A new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults finds that these users are turning to YouTube for much more than entertainment. Roughly half of YouTube users say the platform is very important for helping them figure out how to do things they’ve never done before. That works out to 35% of all U.S. adults, once both users and non-users of the site are accounted for.

Notable shares of Facebook users ages 18 and older lack a clear understanding of how the site’s news feed operates, feel ordinary users have little control over what appears there, and have not actively tried to influence the content the feed delivers to them. When asked whether they understand why certain posts but not others are included in their news feed, around half of US adults who use Facebook (53%) say they do not – with 20% saying they do not understand the feed at all well.