Pew Survey: 64% of Americans Say Social Media Harms Democracy, and the World Is Catching Up
Across the Globe, People Increasingly Say Social Media Is Harming Democracy
A new Pew Research Center survey of 42,151 people across 37 countries finds that in most nations with trend data, the share who believe social media is bad for democracy has risen sharply since 2022 or 2023. The U.S. remains the most negative at 64%, but countries like Germany, France, and the Netherlands have seen double-digit increases. Wealthier nations tend to be more skeptical, while younger adults and lower-income countries remain more positive.
In some ways, other nations are catching up with the U.S. when it comes to seeing social media’s downsides.
- ramity
Do not confuse the medium with the method. Recommendation systems are the root of what plagues us. Democracy was born because of the social media of its time. Social media good. Current implementations bad.
I miss chronological feeds.
- CM30
I feel like the design of many social media platforms is having a bigger effect than the concept itself. Like on a certain level, social media existing has had a lot of benefits. Every hobbyist community I'm part of is going through a golden age due to the ease of communication between people in said hobby, and how quickly discoveries are getting out there.
The issue is that the design is meant to stir up outrage and encourage addiction. Recommendation algorithms, infinite scroll, provocative posts being rewarded overall, length restrictions that kill nuance, echo chambers created by said recommendation algorithms and the ability for any rando to register as many accounts as they want are what's damaging democracy and people's mental health.
Unfortunately, many of those features are also exactly how they're so good at distributing information for people with an interest in any particular niche or sub field. The same algorithms that trap us in echo chambers are also the same ones surfacing awesome new frameworks and programming techniques, tricks for video game speedruns, artwork of whatever you're interested in seeing more of and crazy mods that put N64 games on the SNES.
The challenge is that we really want to surface the best creative works and finds and information about our interests, while not getting caught in a negativity spiral or trapped in a fake news filled echo chamber.
- dabinat
I think one of the biggest ways social media can harm democracy is that it’s trivially easy for a foreign actor (or anyone with malicious intent) to run an influence campaign now. How would they have done it before social media - printed out millions of leaflets? That would be very obvious, expensive, logistically difficult, and hard to scale.
It was very telling when X started showing people’s locations and a lot of the political accounts targeting the US were based in other countries.
- stickfigure
Whenever I hear "social media" in statements like this, I substitute "people conversing with each other unmediated by gatekeepers".
It was nice when the only people that could publish to an audience larger than a room were "trusted sources" with some measure of respectability. Or maybe it wasn't, because I'm not sure these people were all that trustworthy to begin with. So now we have a lot of voices with megaphones and a lot of them don't think like you or I do.
I guess I prefer this world to the world where Truth is handed down by Dan Rather.
- sharts
It’s not social media. It’s marketing. Everything is optimized for engagement and keeping you online and reactive.
- hax0ron3
These arguments nearly always boil down to "stupid people are harming democracy". From which the natural consequence is "stupid people should not be allowed to vote". However, the people making the arguments are generally don't want to say that because it contradicts their ideology or it just plain looks bad, so they resort to an alternative argument: "stupid people should be allowed to vote but the information that they have access to should be controlled by us instead of by the Bad People".
- slibhb
If you think that people freely communicating on the internet is "harming democracy" then maybe you just don't like democracy.
The foundation of liberal democracy is the idea that people are capable of thinking for themselves, making choices, and don't need to rely on kings, popes, presidents, or CEOs to tell them what to do. It's fine to doubt this. Skepticism of democracy starts with the Greeks (who invented it), and runs through Hobbes, Nietzsche, Mencken, Schumpeter, and Thiel. But it's self-refuting to see people arguing, basically, "we have to restrict people's ability to communicate to save democracy". Maybe you can square that circle, but it's hard to see how it can be done without undermining the original argument for liberal democracy.
My view is that, while the internet, social media, etc have raised real challenges, it's simple cowardice to back away from liberal principles because of people lying on the internet about this and that. The liberal experiment has worked well and we should keep running it.
- dghughes
1990s IRC, Yahoo! and MSN Messenger were wild places. I don't know if those are considered social media. It's anonymous global Internet communications people have no fear of reprecussions. It's like a person in a riot throwing a rock there is no control and no fear.