Most Americans have an overwhelmingly negative view of Facebook and see it as a major source of disinformation. That is the conclusion drawn from a recent survey conducted by the full-service market and survey research firm SRSS in cooperation with CNN. The survey asked a little over 1,000 Americans aged 18 and above their views on Big Tech and social media and was conducted on November 1 to 4.
According to Newsbusters, the national survey found that when asked "how much do you trust big technology companies such as Google, Facebook, or Amazon to do what is best for their users," 38% of respondents said "not at all," followed by 29% with "somewhat," 28% with "a little," and only 5% said "a great deal."
The survey also found that a whopping 76% agreed that "Facebook makes American society worse" while only 11% said that "Facebook makes American society better." 13% of respondents said that "Facebook has no effect."
Among those who believe Facebook is bad for society, nearly half or 45% said that it was because of the way Facebook as a company is run rather than the result of the way its users use the social media platform (55%). Half of survey respondents also believed that the solution to this was to increase government regulation of Facebook. Only 11% said there should be a decrease in government regulation of Facebook, while 35% felt that a change was unnecessary.
"Americans also express little faith in the good intentions of big technology firms, with 38% saying they don't trust companies such as Google, Facebook or Amazon at all to do what is best for their users, up from 29% in March 2019," CNN reported. "Only 34% of Americans say they even somewhat trust big tech companies, a modest downtick from 40% two years ago."
Meanwhile, when divided into political categories, a majority in both the Democratic and Republican parties say that they have little trust in Big Tech companies. Up to 71% of surveyed Republicans said they had little or no trust in Big Tech firms, while 58% of Democrats said the same.
Meanwhile, the distrust over Facebook is evident in Ohio, after the state's Attorney General Dave Yost filed a lawsuit against the Big Tech giant for securities fraud, accusing the Mark Zuckerberg-founded organization of misleading the public about its negative effects on children's health and overall well-being, Breitbart reported. Yost argued that Facebook lied about "looking out for our children and weeding out online trolls" because it was "creating misery and divisiveness for profit" instead.
Yost declared, "Yost said. "We are not people to Mark Zuckerberg, we are the product and we are being used against each other out of greed."
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System (OPERS) and its investors and accused Facebook and its senior executives of violating federal securities laws by intentionally misleading the public from April 29, 2021 to October 21, 2021. The lawsuit alleges that Facebook intentionally misled the public with regards to the negative effects its products has on the youth and the steps it supposedly took to protect its users.
In addition, the lawsuit claims that Zuckerberg and other executives within Facebook were aware of the false statements they were releasing with regards to the safety, security, and privacy of its platforms. Publicized internal documents showed that Facebook admitted, "We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly."
