A survey of 19 developed nations: 57% say social media has been good for democracy, 35% say it has been bad; in the US, 34% think it has been good for democracy
Pew Research Center : Tweets: @aedwardslevy , @carrolldoherty , @pewglobal , @richardwike , @monicaranders , @richardwike , and @johngramlich Tweets: Ariel Edwards-Levy / @aedwardslevy : This is a pretty striking reminder that Americans' experience with the internet != the world's experience https://www.pewresearch.org/ ... https://twitter.com/... Carroll Doherty / @carrolldoherty : NEW Fascinating @pewglobal study of global impact of social media, including this: “Roughly half or more in 18 of the 19 countries surveyed say the political system in their country does not allow people like them to have an influence on politics.” https://www.pewresearch.org/ ... https://twitter.com/... @pewglobal : NEW: As people across the globe have increasingly turned to social media to get news and express opinions, the sphere of social media has become a new public space for discussing, and often arguing, about political and social issues. (THREAD) https://www.pewresearch.org/ ... Richard Wike / @richardwike : Looking at the 19 nations we polled, the US is often a major outlier - Americans are much more negative about social media's impact on politics https://www.pewresearch.org/ ... https://twitter.com/... Monica Anderson / @monicaranders : Fascinating work from my @pewglobal colleagues on how views about social media's impact on democracy varies around the globe https://twitter.com/... Richard Wike / @richardwike : Key finding from new @pewglobal report: across 19 countries, a median of 57% say social media has been a good thing for democracy in their country - but it's only 34% in US https://www.pewresearch.org/ ... https://twitter.com/... John Gramlich / @johngramlich : % of adults in each G7 nation who say social media has been a BAD THING for democracy in their country 🇺🇸 US: 64% 🇫🇷 France: 51% 🇬🇧 UK: 48% 🇨🇦 Canada: 47% 🇩🇪 Germany: 41% 🇮🇹 Italy: 40% 🇯🇵 Japan: 23% https://www.pewresearch.org/ ... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Pew's 19-country poll puts the median view of social media's democratic impact at net positive — 57% good versus 35% bad — but the US sits well below that line at 34%, making Americans the skeptics among developed-nation publics. That gap is the endpoint of a long domestic slide Pew has documented: back in 2019, 62% of US adults already said platforms had too much control over the news mix, and by 2021 nearly half wanted government restricting of false information online, up from 39% three years earlier (the false-info survey).
What makes the finding analytically interesting is that the skepticism isn't behavioral: Pew found earlier that US social media use stayed statistically flat through years of controversy (usage held steady), so Americans keep using platforms they increasingly judge harshly — while peers abroad, per this survey, still credit them with democratic value.
First-order effects
- US-facing platforms inherit a legitimacy deficit their international user bases don't share: American users are roughly 20 points below the developed-nation median on social media's democratic value, so identical products carry different reputational loads by market.
- The survey hands US regulators and lawmakers a public already primed for intervention — consistent with the domestic trajectory from wanting tech companies to curb false information toward wanting government itself to do it.
Second-order effects
- Platforms face pressure to run differentiated trust-and-safety and communications strategies by geography rather than one global narrative, because the same feed is read as democracy-enhancing in most surveyed countries and democracy-corroding in its largest English-speaking market.
- Advocacy groups and politicians pushing stricter US platform rules gain a polling tailwind, while counterparts abroad arguing the opposite case — that platforms broadly serve democratic discourse — can cite the 57% median against US-centric criticism.
Third-order effects
- If the divergence holds, platform governance fragments along national lines: legitimacy, and eventually regulation, becomes jurisdiction-specific rather than global, with the US as the restrictive outlier among developed democracies rather than the template.
- A durable split between high usage and low democratic approval in the US points toward platforms being treated there as contested political infrastructure — judged less on connectivity than on their handling of information — even as most peer publics retain a positive baseline.
The trend: Public judgment of social media's democratic value is splitting between the US and other developed democracies, turning America into the skeptical outlier in how platforms are politically governed.