Survey of 4,594 US adults: 72% say it's likely social media firms censor opposing political views; 43% say firms support liberal views over conservative views
A majority of Republicans say technology firms support the views of liberals over conservatives and that social media platforms censor political viewpoints.
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2018 Pew survey is an early data point in a six-year arc of polling on platform power. A year later, the same concern reappeared as a news-quality question: 62% said social media has too much control over the mix of news people see, and by 2024 the framing had hardened into politics outright, with 78% saying social media companies have too much political power.
What makes this survey matter is the gap it exposes: majorities want platforms to police content but don't trust them to do it fairly — [[a:943015|66% say networks should police offensive content while 69% have little or no confidence they will identify it correctly]]. The censorship perception among Republicans sits inside that trust deficit.
First-order effects
- Platforms' moderation and ranking decisions carry a perceived partisan cost: with 72% calling censorship likely and a majority of Republicans reading bias into tech firms' behavior, every enforcement action risks being framed politically rather than operationally.
- Republicans emerge as the constituency most skeptical of tech firms' neutrality, making platform policy a live issue for the party's voters and its politicians.
Second-order effects
- The distrust feeds directly into regulatory demand — support for more regulation of tech giants was at 56% in April 2021 before slipping to 44% by May 2022 as a fifth of Americans shifted toward wanting less regulation, showing the political coalition around platform rules is unstable.
- Content-moderation choices become a pricing-and-policy battleground: firms must weigh enforcement against accusations of viewpoint discrimination, since even growing appetite for restricting false information online collides with the belief that firms censor opposing views.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the durable fix both parties reach for is moving moderation authority away from the platforms themselves — toward government rules or neutral-by-design governance standards — because the core problem measured here is not any single decision but disbelief in the referee.
- Sustained majority perception of censorship and excess power gives legislators a standing mandate to regulate platforms regardless of which party holds office, entrenching Big Tech as a recurring regulatory target.
The trend: Public belief that social media firms are politically biased and over-powerful has persisted across six years of Pew polling, steadily converting distrust of platform moderation into cross-party pressure for external regulation.