According to a study by the Pew Research Center, Facebook is an important driver to online news sites. Even established platforms like CNN, The Huffington Post and The New York Times receive a significant amount of their traffic from Facebook links and referrals, with the Huffington Post topping the list at 8 percent. While these numbers are still far below the traffic generated by search engines like Google, they do represent a growing trend in the industry and demonstrate the capacity of social media contacts to determine the information users read.