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Legacy Media vs. Social Media vs. Aebly Media

Oxford’s word of the year for 2025 was “rage bait.”1 Here is how legacy media, social media and Aebly compare, by the numbers.

An old television set left in the middle of a suburban street at dusk.
In 2025, more Americans got news each week from social media and video than from TV, a first.2

Legacy media

Talks at you.

25%

of Americans trust most news most of the time. A record low.3

  • Suspected of an agendaIn a 2022 survey, half of Americans said most national news outlets intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public.4
  • ImpersonalIn the same survey, only 23% believed most national news outlets care about their audience’s best interests.4
  • ShrinkingAlmost 40% of local newspapers have vanished since 2005. Weekday circulation fell an estimated two-thirds from 1984 to 2022.5,6
A young man’s face lit by his phone screen in a dark room.
In 2025, 53% of U.S. adults got news from social media at least sometimes.7

Social media

Works you up.

67%

higher odds a post from a news outlet or a member of Congress gets shared, for each word about the other side.8

  • Rewards angerA 2023 audit found Twitter’s engagement ranking amplified emotionally charged posts hostile to the other side. Readers said those posts made them feel worse about it.9
  • An echo chamberIn 2020, the typical U.S. Facebook user got half their feed from like-minded sources and only 15% from the other side.10
  • Falsehoods travel fasterOn Twitter, false stories were 70% more likely to be retweeted than true ones.11

Try it· Example

The questionSwipe

Should public schools ban phones during class?

Your compass

2 shots

Aebly Media

Lets you decide.

Both sides.

Each story lays out how people actually feel about the issue, not how the parties line up.

  • You decideAnswer the question first. Then the engagement bar shows where everyone else landed.
  • Your own compassEvery answer moves your civic compass. It shows where you stand issue by issue, not where a party says you should.
  • Make it a gameAnswer a story, earn a throw in Paper Toss. More votes, more shots.

We bring you the perspectives. You decide what to make of them.

Sources11
  1. 1Oxford University Press, “The Oxford Word of the Year 2025 is rage bait” (Dec. 1, 2025). corp.oup.com
  2. 2Reuters Institute, Digital News Report 2025, executive summary: weekly use of social media and video networks for news in the U.S. (54%) overtook TV (50%) and news websites and apps (48%) for the first time. reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk
  3. 3Reuters Institute, Digital News Report 2026, United States (survey of Jan.–Feb. 2026): 25% trust most news most of the time, a new U.S. low since tracking began in 2015. reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk
  4. 4Gallup/Knight Foundation, American Views 2022, Part 2 (fielded May 31–July 21, 2022; published 2023): 50% feel most national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public; 23% believe most care about the best interests of their audience. Local outlets fare better: 47% believe most local news organizations do. knightfoundation.org
  5. 5Medill Local News Initiative, The State of Local News 2025: almost 40% of local newspapers have vanished since 2005, leaving 50 million Americans with limited or no access to local news. localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu
  6. 6Pew Research Center, Newspapers Fact Sheet (last updated 2023): weekday circulation of 63.3 million in 1984 against an estimated 20.9 million in 2022. Pew notes the estimate leaves out most New York Times and Wall Street Journal digital subscriptions. pewresearch.org
  7. 7Pew Research Center, Social Media and News Fact Sheet (survey of Aug. 18–24, 2025): 53% of U.S. adults get news from social media often or sometimes. pewresearch.org
  8. 8Rathje, Van Bavel & van der Linden, “Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media,” PNAS (2021): across 2.7 million Facebook and Twitter posts by news outlets and members of Congress, each word about the opposing side raised the odds of a share by about 67%. The findings are correlational. doi.org
  9. 9Milli et al., “Engagement, user satisfaction, and the amplification of divisive content on social media,” PNAS Nexus (2025): a February 2023 audit of 806 U.S. users found Twitter’s engagement ranking amplified emotionally charged posts hostile to the other side, which users said made them feel worse about that side. Ranking by what users said they wanted instead showed fewer angry, partisan and hostile posts. doi.org
  10. 10Nyhan et al., “Like-minded sources on Facebook are prevalent but not polarizing,” Nature (2023): in 2020 the median U.S. user got 50.4% of their feed from like-minded sources and 14.7% from cross-cutting ones. The same study found that reducing that exposure for three months did not measurably change attitudes or polarization. nature.com
  11. 11Vosoughi, Roy & Aral, “The spread of true and false news online,” Science (2018): on Twitter from 2006 to 2017, falsehoods were 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth. doi.org