Survey of US sentiment toward big tech firms including Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and others on trust, privacy, news accuracy, more
Illustrations by Garret Beard and William Joel — This year marked a sea change in our attitude toward tech's largest players — and not for the better.
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2017 Verge survey is the opening data point in what became a recurring measurement series: it captured a broad souring of US sentiment toward Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter on trust, privacy, and news accuracy just as election interference and misinformation concerns were peaking. Weeks later, coverage of big tech's accumulating gaffes framed that erosion as a sector-wide problem rather than isolated missteps.
The baseline proved durable enough to track against. By 2020, a follow-up found 72% of respondents saying Facebook has too much power and a majority open to breaking up Google and YouTube (the split-up question), and by late 2021 Facebook's favorability had slipped further while Amazon, Apple, and Google held higher ground (the 2021 favorability numbers). What started as a one-off sentiment check turned into a longitudinal record of tech's legitimacy problem.
First-order effects
- Facebook emerges from the 2017 measurement as the most exposed of the seven firms, with privacy and news-accuracy concerns landing directly on its brand while rivals like Amazon and Microsoft are measured against the same declining tide.
- The survey hands journalists, advertisers, and policymakers a quantified public-opinion baseline for big tech at the exact moment trust stops being an abstraction and becomes a trackable metric.
Second-order effects
- The methodology gets institutionalized: The Verge repeats the survey in 2020 and 2021, converting one-time sentiment into year-over-year benchmarks that competitors' PR teams and regulators can be held to.
- Declining trust feeds structural demands — by the 2020 wave, majorities support curbing Facebook's power and splitting Google's properties, moving the debate from reputation management toward antitrust remedies.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer trust functions as infrastructure for platform businesses: the firms that monetize attention and personal data (Facebook, Google, Twitter) absorb the reputational cost, while transactional platforms (Amazon, Apple, Microsoft) retain more headroom.
- Sustained sentiment decline creates the political conditions for regulation — the same concerns measured here recur through the 2020 and 2021 waves, suggesting public opinion becomes a standing input into how governments treat platform power.
The trend: US public sentiment toward big tech shifted from default goodwill to measurable skepticism after 2017, with recurring surveys turning trust into a benchmark that separates ad-and-data platforms from transactional ones.