Three-Quarters of Americans Believe Facebook Makes Society Worse, Poll Finds

Facebook has been fending off accusations of failing to tackle misinformation and harmful content on its platform, with the company's former employee, Frances Haugen, leaking a bunch of internal documents to back the accusations, and calling on US Congress to make sure that the company is held accountable.

Three out of four adults in the United States believe that Facebook is making society worse, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS.

The research finds that 76% of Americans believe Facebook worsens society, with 11% saying the opposite. Another 13% asserted it has no effect either way.

While respondents of all genders, races and ages are somewhat unified in believing that Facebook is harmful to society, disagreements arise when it comes to who exactly is to blame: the platform itself (45% think so), or the way people use it (as said by 55%).

Almost half of those who participated in the survey, 49%, said that they know someone who they think was persuaded to believe in a conspiracy theory because of Facebook's content. 61% of people who said so are younger than 35, and only 35% are 65 or older.

More than half of Americans, 53%, said that the federal government should ramp up Facebook's regulation, with 11% saying it should not and 35% believing that the amount of regulation should remain as it was.

The respondents were also asked to reveal how much they trust big tech companies such as Google, Amazon or Facebook, with 38% of the participants saying they don't trust such firms, and 34% saying they somewhat trust them.

The poll comes as Facebook is weathering a media storm, accused by its ex-staffers of failing to protect its users from harmful content. The company's former data scientist Frances Haugen has leaked a handful of internal documents backing the accusations, which became the base of a cascade of stories dubbed "The Facebook Papers" that detail the platform's wrongdoings.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, however, argued that the leaks are being used in order to create a "false image" of his company and dismissed the accusations. In what was seen by many as an attempt to clean up the social media platform's reputation, Zuckerberg moved to rebrand the company from "Facebook" to "Meta", announcing the goal of focusing on the creation of the so-called "metaverse".