Harris poll: 22% of Americans say they trust Facebook with their personal information, 48% view Facebook more negatively than they did six months ago
Context & Ripple Effects
The Harris numbers arrive eight months after a Reuters/Ipsos poll already ranked Facebook last among the major platforms on privacy: just 41% of Americans trusted it to obey privacy laws, against 66% for Amazon, 62% for Google, 60% for Microsoft, and 53% for Apple. What is new in November 2018 is the direction of travel — 48% of Americans say their view of Facebook turned more negative in just six months.
The subsequent coverage confirms this was not a single-poll dip: by early 2020 a survey of 12,043 US adults found 59% distrusted Facebook specifically for political and election news, and by late 2020 an internal Facebook survey showed only 51% of its own people believed the company had positive impact, down sharply within months.
First-order effects
- Facebook carries the weakest trust position among the big-five platforms measured — the Harris 22% on personal information compounds the Reuters/Ipsos finding that it already trailed Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple on privacy compliance.
- With 48% of Americans reporting a more negative view than six months prior, the reputational damage is recent and accelerating, not a legacy scar Facebook can date-stamp and move past.
Second-order effects
- Trust measurement itself becomes a recurring beat around the company — outside pollsters keep quantifying the deficit and Facebook's own internal surveys mirror it, turning public sentiment into a standing metric the company must answer for.
- Rivals' consistently higher scores (66% for Amazon and 62% for Google on obeying privacy laws) hand them a comparative data-stewardship argument they can deploy against Facebook in consumer-facing positioning.
Third-order effects
- Across the multi-year arc the gap persists and migrates — from privacy compliance in 2018 to political-news distrust in 2020 to internal morale — pointing toward a durable structural trust discount for Facebook rather than a scandal-cycle dip.
- If the pattern holds, third-party trust rankings harden into a competitive axis alongside product and price, giving advertisers and policymakers a consistent evidentiary base for treating platforms differently on data handling.
The trend: Public trust in Facebook has been in measurable decline since at least 2018, with each successive survey extending the deficit from privacy into political content and even the company's own internal sentiment.