Survey of 1,000 tech industry workers: 51% believe “Trump has a point when it comes to the media producing fake news” and 59% favor working with the US military
A new study by BuzzFeed News and Lucid surveyed tech workers on their attitudes toward the media. Tweets: @anandwrites , @wesyang , @emilybell , @carnage4life , @cequirk , @bernstein , @went1955 , @mattmittenthal , @davidmackau , and @rmac18 See also Mediagazer Tweets: Anand Giridharadas / @anandwrites : A majority of workers in tech, which made a fortune from journalists' content, believes Trump about fake news. This overwhelmingly white, male sector also dislikes identity politics. Maybe they shouldn't run our schools and projects to save journalism? https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... pic.twitter.com/eN1t0zbHdt Wesley Yang / @wesyang : Lots of interesting findings in this poll, including that many tech workers think the media has become too feminist, and that tech workers respect Google and do not respect Facebook http://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... http://twitter.com/... Emily Bell / @emilybell : Tech does not like media (journalism) much. There are some good reasons for this - but there is also, in my experience, a vacuum in understanding the role played by communications technologies in democracy in many tech cos...which is http://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : The fact that journalists report obviously ethically poor practices like Facebook using their Onavo VPN to decide what competitors to copy as equivalent to benign occurences of apps using Facebook's public APIs damages their credibility among techies. http://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Christy Quirk / @cequirk : Would like to see the methodology on this survey, particularly the gender split of the sample. Tech Industry Worker Survey Reveals Deep Skepticism Of Media https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Joe Bernstein / @bernstein : We surveyed 1000 tech industry professionals to find out what they think about the media. It turns out more than half of them think President Trump has a point about the media creating fake news. My story: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Robert Went / @went1955 : Survey: 51% of tech industry workers believe Trump has a point about The media creating fake news. Nearly 4 in 10 of tech workers (38%) and nearly half of men in the industry (45%) surveyed believe “the media has become too feminist” (ht @AnandWrites) https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Matt Mittenthal / @mattmittenthal : “@BuzzFeedNews conducted the first-ever survey of attitudes of tech workers toward the media...more than a third (34%) of survey respondents, and more than 4 in 10 male survey respondents (41%), believe the media is unfair to white men” — @Bernstein https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... David Mack / @davidmackau : More than a third of tech workers believe the media is too feminist https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... via @bernstein Ryan Mac / @rmac18 : Lot of interesting things in this survey of how tech workers view news coverage, among them how 32% of 1,000 respondents felt that Facebook has had a negative impact on society.http://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... http://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
This survey puts numbers on a rift that related coverage has been documenting anecdotally for years: the Slate Star Codex clash with The New York Times and the running battle between a16z figures and the journalists who cover them both framed tech's hostility to its own press as a fight among prominent individuals. BuzzFeed News and Lucid's polling of 1,000 rank-and-file workers suggests it runs deeper than a few loud voices on Twitter.
The finding also lands awkwardly for the messenger: BuzzFeed News profits from the same attention economy tech built, and earlier coverage showed how contested platform-mediated news already was — from the [[a:869803|Facebook Trending controversy, where only a quarter of young voters even followed the story]] to Facebook's plans to rank news sources by user trust surveys.
First-order effects
- Tech reporters now have polling evidence that a majority of the people they cover — and much of their own industry's audience — side with Trump's framing of 'fake news', raising the cost of access journalism aimed at a skeptical subject pool.
- BuzzFeed News publishing a study that undermines its own sector's standing forces other outlets to treat tech-worker sentiment as a measurable beat rather than a Twitter anecdote.
Second-order effects
- Platform companies face a workforce whose views on media credibility diverge sharply from the press that covers them, complicating products like Facebook's trust-ranking surveys where 'the media' and 'the users' are being asked to validate each other.
- The 59% pro-military figure gives defense-adjacent recruiting inside tech firms a legitimacy argument that was previously confined to a vocal minority of founders.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the gatekeeping relationship between Silicon Valley and the press structurally inverts: tech builds the distribution, audiences supply the trust judgments, and newsrooms become one content supplier among many whose authority is polled rather than presumed.
- A tech workforce comfortable with military work points toward normalization of defense contracts as a mainstream career path, eroding the civilian-idealism identity that once distinguished the industry.
The trend: Trust between the tech industry and the press is decoupling into two separate publics, with each side's credibility increasingly measured by surveys the other side dismisses.