One-Fifth of Americans Getting Campaign News on Facebook

This post has been updated to correct a statistic about newspapers as a source of election news

About 20 percent of Americans are learning something about the presidential campaign on Facebook, compared with 42 percent who are getting some election news from their local daily newspapers, according to a study released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

About 22 percent of Americans regularly read about the campaign in their local papers compared with just 6 percent who regularly get that news from Facebook, the study said. About 5 percent of Americans are learning about the campaign on Twitter.

The number of people following the election anywhere online is about the same as it was at this point during the 2008 election cycle, while local newspaper readers have declined by about 10 percent since then, the report said.

About 6 percent of Americans are following a candidate's updates on Facebook or Twitter, the report said, compared with about 3 percent at this point during the 2008 campaign. Those numbers may be affected by the fact that 2008 saw vigorous contests in both political parties, while President Obama is not facing a serious challenge for the Democratic nomination this year.

About half of Americans are learning about the campaign from news organizations' websites or mobile apps, with CNN.com and Yahoo leading the pack at 24 percent and 22 percent respectively, the report said. About 10 percent of Americans are getting online election news from Fox News and about 8 percent are going to MSNBC's website.