Axios Harris Poll of US adults: Facebook's reputation dropped from 51st to 94th in 2018, following myriad scandals; Amazon, Netflix, and Apple's remained steady
Data: The Axios Harris Poll 100; Chart: Axios Visuals — Facebook's reputation took a long dive over the past year …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second consecutive year the Harris polling franchise has tracked a Big Tech reputation gap. In the March 2018 edition of the annual Harris reputation poll, Amazon retained the top spot while Apple fell from 5th to 29th and Google from 8th to 28th; by November, a separate Harris survey found only 22% of Americans trusted Facebook with their personal information, with 48% viewing it more negatively than six months prior.
The new Axios Harris Poll numbers extend that arc: Facebook's drop from 51st to 94th is not a one-year blip but the continuation of a documented slide, and later coverage confirms it stuck — a 2021 survey still showed just 66% viewing Facebook favorably, well behind Apple, Amazon, and Google. The contrast with Amazon, Netflix, and Apple holding steady is what makes this a divergence story rather than a general tech-backlash story.
First-order effects
- Facebook enters 2019 with the worst measured reputation among the major consumer tech platforms, a direct readout of how the year's scandals landed with US adults.
- Amazon, Netflix, and Apple get a clean bill of public sentiment in the same dataset, insulating them from the backlash narrative attached to Facebook.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's data-trust deficit — only 22% willing to share personal information per the November Harris poll — puts pressure on the advertising model that depends on exactly that data, while steadier-reputation rivals can court users and advertisers on trust as a differentiator.
- Reputation rankings like the Axios Harris Poll 100 become a recurring scoreboard media and policymakers cite, forcing Facebook to defend its brand annually alongside its product decisions.
Third-order effects
- If the multi-year pattern holds — Facebook trailing its peers in every subsequent survey through 2021 — reputation itself becomes a structural competitive liability for Facebook, decoupling it from the cohort of big tech companies the public still rates highly.
- Sustained public distrust of one dominant social platform strengthens the case for regulatory scrutiny of data practices, since the polling record gives legislators a quantified mandate.
The trend: Public reputation among major US tech platforms is diverging along company lines, with Facebook alone suffering sustained multi-year erosion while Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google hold their ground.