Donald Trump may rush to Twitter to stay in touch with the world, but Canadians are increasingly relying on Facebook as their first source of news, according to a new survey of media-consumption habits in this country.

In fact, Facebook is quickly closing in on TV as the place where Canadians of all ages first get their news, according to the newest Matters of Opinion survey, a large, annual report on the country’s media consumption habits.

“We are addicted to Facebook,” says the report on the survey, carried out by Abacus Data and the digital public affairs firm Full Duplex, and released this morning.

While 29 per cent of Canadians still head to the TV when they’re seeking breaking news, another 21 per cent find out things first from Facebook, the survey says. News websites (such as this one) are the primary source of new information for 14 per cent of media consumers and Twitter accounts for 5 per cent — just below old-fashioned word of mouth, at 6 per cent.

Canadians are reporting that they use Facebook and other social-media sites as news sources at about double the rate recorded just two years ago — and more than 60 per cent of respondents said they check in on Facebook at least once a day.

“If you want to get a story or opinion in front of a Canadian audience, you need to make sure you’re making it available to consumers in an attention-getting and engaging way on Facebook,” the report says.

“If we had told you in 2005 (the year Facebook was launched in Canada) that about six in ten would check the site at least once every day only a decade later, you wouldn’t have believed us.”

No surprise — the biggest daily Facebook users are those between 18 and 29 years of age, but lots of people 60 years of age and older are also Facebook loyalists. Nearly half of the older group — 49 per cent — said they check Facebook daily, while 75 per cent in the younger age group said Facebook was a daily habit.

Many of these interactions are happening on a smartphone or tablet. The survey found that 79 per cent of respondents have smartphones and 57 per cent have tablets.

Facebook’s ascent in the rankings of Canadian news sources is going to raise new questions about its role in distributing “fake news” — and its ability to give people only the facts and opinions they want to hear. Traditional media businesses are already alarmed over how much advertising revenue Facebook is claiming.

‘The reliance on Facebook as a primary source means users are getting a limited world view and limited set of opinions that most closely match their own.’ ‘The reliance on Facebook as a primary source means users are getting a limited world view and limited set of opinions that most closely match their own.’

A report issued late last year showed that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government was likely to spend more on Facebook ads in 2016 — the Liberals’ first full year in office — than Stephen Harper’s former Conservative government spent in total on Facebook advertising between 2006 and 2014.

The Matters of Opinion report sounds an alarm about what it calls Facebook “myopia.”

“Facebook’s algorithms are designed to cater news and information to each user’s unique interests,” it states. “The resulting reliance on Facebook as a primary source means users are getting a limited world view and limited set of opinions that most closely match their own.”

On the other hand, the survey also shows that most Canadians are a pretty flexible lot, opinion-wise. A little more than 71 per cent said they could be persuaded to change their minds about what they read online — provided the argument comes from a trusted and convincing source. Another 6 per cent said they would change their views on current events “fairly easily.” Only 23 per cent said they “rarely” change their minds on current affairs and politics.

And in another revealing snapshot of Canada’s floating electorate, the survey finds that Conservative voters from 2015 are the most fixed in their opinions; 33 per cent of the “rarely”-changed minds identified themselves as Conservative voters in 2015, compared to 19 per cent of Liberals and New Democrats.

Those findings confirm that the same 2015 election dynamic was still in play last year, when the survey was conducted online among 2,010 Canadians 18 years of age and over. Liberals and New Democrats appear to be more open to considering a second choice from trusted and convincing sources, according to the survey — or at least more open than past Conservative voters.

The survey was conducted last August, long before Donald Trump became U.S. president and took to Twitter as his main channel of communication. So next year’s Matters of Opinion report may find that more Canadians are tuning into Twitter for their first news.

The report hastens to point out that the Canadians who do use Twitter for breaking news aren’t negligible; they include what the report calls the “influencers” in this country’s political landscape. Twitter is described as a “powerful amplifier” because tweets can end up on the radar of the bigger media distributors — traditional media and Facebook.

The report draws a demographic sketch of the “influencers” in the Canadian-media universe, defined as the four in 10 who actively like to share opinions, rather than merely listening or “zoning out” when politics comes up in conversation.

About 52 per cent of them are men, 48 per cent women. About 60 per cent are aged 45 and older. Eighty-three per cent of them voted in the last election — 39 per cent for the Liberals, 32 per cent for the Conservatives and 18 per cent for the New Democrats.

Thirty-five per cent of them hear news first on TV, 17 per cent from a news website and 16 per cent from Facebook.

The report also draws an interesting — and unexpected — portrait of young Canadians’ political engagement. “Millennials are not apathetic,” the report says, citing survey results showing that more than half of Canadians under 29 — 54 per cent — say they discuss politics “very often” or “somewhat often.”

In comparison, 51 per cent of people 30-44 report the same frequency in political conversations; that percentage drops to just 44 per cent for people aged 45 to 59 and just 43 per cent for people over 60. Yet while the frequency of political conversations seems to decline with age, the breadth of interest increases: The survey shows that younger Canadians tend to focus their discussions on a narrow range of issues, compared to a wider swath for older Canadians.

Overall, the digital revolution has definitely arrived with a slight edge in the lives of Canadian news consumers, according to Matters of Opinion. A full 51 per cent of respondents said they were getting their news first online, while only 49 per cent said they relied on offline news sources.

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