Americans are much more likely to discuss or share news privately online than to post about it publicly, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis. In a 2025 survey, 56% of U.S. adults said they had privately chatted about or shared news online in the previous week, while 26% said they had publicly posted, shared or commented about news.
Pew published the findings Wednesday as part of its Pew-Knight Initiative. Another 45% of respondents said they had liked or saved posts about news in the prior week. These activities can overlap, and a like or saved post is not necessarily invisible to others. The questions covered websites, social media and messaging apps.
Age and political differences
Younger adults were more likely to report private news conversation and liking or saving news posts. Among adults ages 18-29, 65% said they had privately chatted about or shared news, compared with 53% of those 65 and older. Fifty-nine percent of the younger group had liked or saved a news post, compared with 32% of the older group.
Public posting did not show the same age pattern. Pew found that 23% of adults ages 18-29 and 25% of those 65 and older had publicly posted, shared or commented about news in the prior week; the figures for the two middle age groups were 26% and 28%. The survey does not show that younger people avoid news, only that their forms of visible online participation differ less by age.
Overall, Democrats and Republicans, including independents who lean toward either party, engaged with news online at similar rates, Pew said. Within each party, ideological groups differed. Sixty-nine percent of liberal Democrats reported privately chatting about or sharing news, compared with 54% of moderate or conservative Democrats. The corresponding figures were 58% for conservative Republicans and 50% for moderate or liberal Republicans.
How Pew surveyed adults
The analysis draws on Pew's Cross-Sectional Engagement Survey of 5,393 U.S. adults, conducted July 9-Dec. 5, 2025. Participants were recruited through a random sample of residential addresses and could complete the survey online, on paper or by telephone. Pew reported an overall margin of error of plus or minus 1.9 percentage points for the full sample; subgroup estimates have larger margins.
Respondents were asked whether they had done each activity in the past week, so the percentages describe self-reported recent behavior, not a count of posts or a measure of how much news people consumed. Pew did not report a separate New York or Finger Lakes result in this analysis.
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