Pew survey of 1,116 technologists and other experts: most say political and social divide feeds misinfo online; 51% say things won't improve over next decade
Laura Hazard Owen / Nieman Lab :
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2017 Pew survey of 1,116 technologists is an early entry in what became a running series of expert-and-public readings on misinformation. The expert view it captures — political and social division as the root cause, with 51% expecting no improvement over the decade — was later echoed from the other direction: a follow-up expert panel found 49% saying tech would mostly weaken democracy through 2030 (49% say tech will weaken democracy).
Public sentiment moved in parallel. A Gallup-Knight survey found 85% of US adults saying platforms weren't doing enough against fake news (85% say platforms fall short), and by 2021, 48% of Americans wanted government to restrict false information online, up from 39% in 2018 (support for restricting false info rose to 48%). The 2017 expert pessimism reads as the leading edge of a durable consensus.
First-order effects
- Platforms like Facebook and Google enter the next decade facing an expert community that largely attributes misinformation to societal divides rather than purely technical fixes — undercutting product-only remediation narratives.
- Newsrooms and fact-checking operations get little comfort: a majority of the people building these systems expect the problem to persist through roughly 2027.
Second-order effects
- As expert pessimism filtered into public opinion, pressure shifted from voluntary platform action toward external intervention — first transparency demands, then growing public backing for government restriction of false content.
- Trust erosion compounds: with most Americans lacking confidence that tech companies can prevent misuse of their own platforms, platforms' self-regulation claims lose persuasive power with both users and policymakers.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, misinformation governance migrates from platform discretion toward regulatory frameworks — a trajectory consistent with later findings that majorities now see social media companies as holding too much political power and want more regulation.
- The recurring finding that polarization, not just technology, drives misinformation points toward interventions aimed at media literacy and institutional trust rather than content moderation alone becoming the policy center of gravity.
The trend: Expert and public opinion on misinformation has converged over the past decade from platform skepticism toward demands for external regulation of how information is distributed online.