Last Call For The Anti-Social Networks

Clear majorities of Americans in the latest NBC News/WSJ poll see social media correctly as the fake news sinkholes and privacy-destroying monstrosities that they are, but they're not quite ready to call for the government to break them up.

Yet.

The American public holds negative views of social-media giants like Facebook and Twitter, with sizable majorities saying these sites do more to divide the country than unite it and spread falsehoods rather than news, according to results from the latest national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

What’s more, six in 10 Americans say they don’t trust Facebook at all to protect their personal information, the poll finds.

But the public also believes that technology in general has more benefits than drawbacks on the economy, and respondents are split about whether the federal government should break up the largest tech companies like Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook.

“Social media — and Facebook, in particular — have some serious issues in this poll,” said Micah Roberts, a pollster at the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies, which conducted this survey with the Democratic firm Hart Research Associates.

“If America was giving social media a Yelp review, a majority would give it zero stars,” Roberts added.

According to the poll, 57 percent of Americans say they agree with the statement that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter do more to divide the country, while 35 percent think they do more to bring the nation together.
Fifty-five percent believe social media does more to spread lies and falsehoods, versus 31 percent who say it does more to spread news and information.

Sixty-one percent think social media does more to spread unfair attacks and rumors against public figures and corporations, compared with 32 percent who say it does more to hold those public figures and corporations accountable.

And a whopping 82 percent say social media sites do more to waste people’s time, versus 15 percent who say they do more to use Americans’ time well.

But those numbers also come as nearly seven in 10 Americans — 69 percent — say they use social media at least once a day.

As with the FCC and television, social media desperately needs regulation.  I just don't trust the Trump regime to do it properly at all.

The fact remains though trillion-dollar companies need to be broken up.