Pew: Majority of Americans Believe Social Media Is Biased

A majority of Americans believe that social media platforms are politically biased in the way they deliver news stories to their users, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center.

Here are some key findings from the study, which can be read in full here.

• 62 percent of Americans say social media companies have “too much control over the mix of news that people see.” This includes 75 percent of Republican respondents and 53 percent of Democrat respondents.
• 82 percent of Americans believe social media companies treat some news organizations differently to others.
• Of the 82 percent, 79 percent say that social media companies favor news organizations that have a “certain political stance.”
• 24 percent of respondents consider the banning of news organizations and personalities to be a “very big problem,” and 29 percent of respondents consider it to be a “moderately big problem.”
• 69 percent of respondents agree that censorship of the news is either a “moderately big problem” or a “very big problem.”
• Nearly half (48 percent) of respondents say the news they see on social media is liberal or very liberal, compared to just 15 percent who say it is conservative or very conservative.

Previous Pew studies have found plummeting trust in social media companies among Americans. As Breitbart’s Sean Moran reported earlier this year, Americans’ trust in social media companies has fallen by 21 points from 2015 to 2019.

Last year, another Pew study found that a majority of both Republicans and Democrats agree that social media companies censor people on the basis of political viewpoint, an allegation that big tech companies have repeatedly denied.