By: JOSEPHINE JOHNSON
Capital News Service
Social media platforms are seeing rising political polarization in the last two years, mirroring a broader surge in partisan division across the country, according to data recently released by Pew Research Center.
Polarized social media is a reflection of America’s hyper-partisan state, according to Ernesto Calvo, professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland.
“The U.S. is very very polarized,” Calvo said. “Polarization can always get worse. But at this point we are in a really high level of polarization.”
Pew Research Center surveyed over 5,000 Americans in 2023 and another 5,000 in 2025 about their social media usage. In those two years, Democrats and Republicans have shifted platforms and widened the partisan gaps on popular social media sites.
The most notable example, according to Pew Research Center, is X (formerly known as Twitter). Two years ago, Democrats were more likely to report using X. Now, the majority of users are Republican. The shift happened after right-wing billionaire Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022.
For the first time in 2025, Pew Research Center included three new apps in the data: Threads, Truth Social and Bluesky. They host the smallest amount of the population and are the most partisan of the 11 included in the 2025 survey.
Ten percent of respondents reported using Threads, founded as part of Meta in 2023. The majority were democrats under 50.
Four percent of respondents reported using Bluesky and the majority were democrats under 50. Bluesky was founded as part of Twitter in 2019 and became independent in 2022, shortly before Musk bought Twitter, now X.
Three percent of those surveyed reported using Truth Social, founded by President Donald Trump in 2022. The majority were republicans over 50.
Polarization on social media doesn’t necessarily make Americans more polarized, but is the result of America’s already hyper-partisan population, according to Calvo.
“The fact that we have more segregation [on social media] is more the consequence of polarization than the cause,” Calvo said.
Republicans make up the majority users on X and Truth Social while Democrats are the majority users on Whatsapp, Reddit, Threads and Bluesky. Other websites remain more evenly split.
Youtube is the most popular social media site for all demographics surveyed by Pew while other platforms tend to differ by demographic. There are gaps forming politically, but also by age and gender, according to the survey results.
Social media is “fragmenting,” Calvo said.
Women, according to Pew’s survey results, outnumber men on Facebook and Instagram. Men have a slight majority on X and Reddit. Adults under 30 tend to use YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat while older adults are mostly on YouTube and Facebook.
Over half of U.S. adults at least occasionally get their news from social media, according to a separate survey by Pew in 2025.
Almost 40% of people got news from Facebook, according to the survey, while only 2% of those surveyed got their news from Bluesky, 2% from Truth Social and 3% from Threads.
A lot of the news that users get from social media is from traditional outlets and shared to the site, Calvo said, and is similar to only consuming news from partisan outlets that align with one political party.
“The menu of the information that you are getting is, today, more partisan than what it used to [be].”
