From smartphones to social media, tech use has become the norm in the last decade

As of 2019, nine-in-ten U.S. adults say they go online, 81% say they own a smartphone and 72% say they use social media. Growth in adoption of some technologies has slowed in recent years, in some instances because there just aren’t many non-users left, especially among younger generations. For example, 93% of Millennials (ages 23 to 38 in 2019) own smartphones, and nearly 100% say they use the internet. Social media is now a key pathway to news for Americans. In 2018, for the first time, social media sites surpassed print newspapers as a news source for Americans. One-in-five adults said they often get news from social media, slightly higher than the share who often did so from print newspapers (16%). Among social media sites, Facebook dominates in terms of news consumption: Around half of all U.S. adults (52%) now say they get news there.