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While most of the 19 countries surveyed believe social media has had a positive impact on democracy, there are substantial cross-national differences on this question and the United States is a clear outlier.
Just 34% of U.S. adults think social media has been good for democracy, while 64% say it has had a bad impact. In fact, the U.S. is an outlier on a number of measures, with larger shares of Americans seeing social media as divisive.
The share of Americans who are unfamiliar with the term “cancel culture” has shrunk 17 percentage points since 2020. But there are still about four-in-ten who say they have heard not too much (16%) or nothing at all (23%) about the phrase.
In just five years, the percentage of Republicans with at least some trust in national news organizations has been cut in half – dropping from 70% in 2016 to 35% this year. This decline is fueling the continued widening of the partisan gap in trust of the media.
Nearly eight-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (78%) say they have “a lot” or “some” trust in the information that comes from national news organizations – 43 percentage points higher than Republicans and Republican leaners (35%) – according to a June survey. This partisan gap is the largest of any time that this question has been asked since 2016.
Among 11 social media sites asked about as a regular source of news, Facebook sits at the top, with about a third (36%) of Americans getting news there regularly. YouTube comes next, with 23% of U.S. adults regularly getting news there. Twitter serves as a regular news source for 15% of U.S. adults.
About half of Americans (47%) say major tech companies should be regulated by the government more than they are now. Another 39% say these companies should be regulated the same as they are now, while just 11% say these firms should be regulated less, according to a survey conducted in June 2020. Though the public’s overall views have remained largely unchanged since the question was last asked in May and June of 2018, there have been shifts by party and ideology. For instance, similar shares of Republicans and independents who lean toward the GOP (48%) and Democrats and their leaners (46%) now agree that major technology companies should face more regulation by the government, a change caused in part by rising support among conservative Republicans.
Entering the peak of the 2020 election season, social media platforms are firmly entrenched as a venue for Americans to process campaign news and engage in various types of social activism. But not all Americans use these platforms in similar ways.
A new analysis of U.S. adults’ Twitter behaviors finds that Democrats and Republicans have notable differences in how they use the site – from how often they tweet to the accounts they follow or mention in their own posts.
About two-thirds of Americans (64%) say social media have a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in the country today, according to a survey of U.S. adults conducted July 13-19, 2020. Just one-in-ten Americans say social media sites have a mostly positive effect on the way things are going, and one-quarter say these platforms have a neither positive nor negative effect.
Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to say major tech companies favor the views of liberals over conservatives. At the same time, partisans differ on whether social media companies should flag inaccurate information on their platforms.
As nationwide protests continue over police brutality and the death of George Floyd, the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, which is often used in connection with police-related deaths of black Americans, has been used roughly 47.8 million times on Twitter – an average of just under 3.7 million times per day – from May 26 to June 7, according to a new analysis of publicly available tweets.
Getting news from social media is an increasingly common experience; nearly three-in-ten U.S. adults do so often.
As heated debate continues over how social media sites can improve the quality of news on their platforms while enforcing rules fairly, most Americans are pessimistic about these efforts and are highly concerned about several issues when it comes to social media and news. Majorities say that social media companies have too much control over the news on their sites, and that the role social media companies play in delivering the news on their sites results in a worse mix of news for users.
Facebook use has grown fastest among older Americans in recent years, with notable increases among Baby Boomers and members of the Silent Generation since 2015. During the same period, the share of Millennials and Gen Xers who use the platform has stayed relatively flat.
Millennials have often led older Americans in their adoption and use of technology, and this largely holds true today. But there has been significant growth in tech adoption since 2012 among older generations – particularly Gen Xers and Baby Boomers.
Well over a year before the 2020 presidential election, many social media users in the United States are already exhausted by how much political content they see on these platforms.
