Does exposure to news affect what people know about politics? This old question attracted new scholarly interest as the political informa- tion environment is changing rapidly. In particular, since citizens have new channels at their disposal, such as Twitter and Facebook, which increasingly complement or even replace traditional channels of information. This study investigates to what extent citizens have knowledge about daily politics and to what extent news on social media can provide this knowledge. It does so by means of a large online survey in Belgium (Flanders), in which we measured what people know about current political events, their so-called general surveillance knowledge. Our findings demonstrate that unlike following news via traditional media channels, citizens do not gain more political knowledge from following news on social media. We even find a negative association between following the news on Facebook and political knowledge.