Pew: 74% of Americans have little or no confidence in tech companies like Facebook and Google preventing misuse of their platforms to influence 2020 election
Nearly three-quarters of Americans (74%) express little or no confidence in technology companies like Facebook …
Context & Ripple Effects
This Pew finding lands on top of a decade of eroding numbers: back in 2015, 69% of US adults already doubted social networks would keep their data private and secure, and by 2018 only 41% of Americans trusted Facebook to obey privacy laws while Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple all scored far higher in Reuters/Ipsos polling.
What changes here is the stakes: the question shifts from data handling to election integrity, and the answer arrives just months before the 2020 vote. It sits alongside [[a:932436|Gallup-Knight's finding that 85% of Americans think platforms do too little to combat fake news]] and, days later, a Verge poll showing 72% believe Facebook has too much power and 51% want Google and YouTube split into separate companies.
First-order effects
- Facebook and Google enter the 2020 election cycle carrying a named credibility deficit: nearly three-quarters of Americans expect them to fail at preventing misuse of their own platforms before any specific incident even occurs.
- Any election-integrity measures the two companies announce now start from a presumption of failure, since the public has already judged their prevention capability inadequate.
Second-order effects
- The distrust converts directly into structural sentiment: the Verge poll taken days later shows 51% of Americans wanting Google and YouTube broken up, and Pew's own 2024 follow-up finds 78% saying social media companies hold too much political power with 51% backing heavier regulation.
- Platforms' moderation choices become politically charged either way — Pew's 2019 survey already showed 66% want social networks to police offensive content while 69% lack confidence they will identify it correctly, so every enforcement decision risks confirming the distrust.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform self-governance loses standing as the default mechanism for election integrity: sustained majorities favoring more regulation and structural remedies shift oversight toward regulators and away from company trust-and-safety teams.
- The trust gap becomes a durable competitive asymmetry within Big Tech itself — the 2018 Reuters/Ipsos data showed hardware-and-commerce firms like Amazon and Apple trusted well above Facebook — pressuring the social platforms specifically rather than the sector uniformly.
The trend: Across a decade of Pew, Gallup-Knight, and Reuters/Ipsos surveys, American confidence in tech platforms governing themselves has steadily collapsed, turning trust deficits into political pressure for regulation and structural breakups.