Ultimately, both sides agree: social media companies are too powerful.
According to a Pew Research Center survey, 78% of American adults say social media companies have too much influence on politics – broken down by party, that’s 84% of Republicans and 74% of Democrats. Overall, this viewpoint has become 6% more popular since the last presidential election year.
Americans’ feelings about social media reflect those of their lawmakers. Among the only policy efforts to gain significant bipartisan support recently have been efforts to hold social media platforms accountable. Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) have been working across the aisle on their Kids Online Safety Act, a bill that would impose a duty of care on social media platforms to ensure the safety of to ensure children; But some privacy advocates have criticized the bill as having the potential to make adults more vulnerable to government surveillance.
Meanwhile, Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) also formed an unlikely partnership to propose a bill that would create a commission to oversee major technology platforms.
“The only thing worse than me getting even with Elizabeth Warren is her getting even with me,” Graham said at a Senate hearing in January.
It’s obvious why Americans believe tech companies have too much political power – since the 2020 poll, social platforms were used to coordinate an attack on the Capitol, and then a sitting president was banned from those platforms for supporting those attacks had cheered. Meanwhile, the government is so concerned about the influence of Chinese company TikTok that President Biden just signed a bill that could ban the app permanently.
But conservative and liberal Americans have divergent views on tech company bias. While 71% of Republicans surveyed said big tech companies favor liberal views over conservative ones, 50% of Democrats said tech companies support both views equally. Only 15% of adults overall said tech companies support conservatives over liberals.
These poll results make sense given the rise of explicitly conservative social platforms like Rumble, Parler, and Trump’s own Truth Social app.
During Biden’s presidency, government agencies such as the FTC and DOJ have increased their targeting of tech companies. Some of the country’s largest companies, such as Amazon, Apple and Meta, have faced extensive lawsuits over alleged monopolistic behavior. But according to the Pew survey, only 16% of U.S. adults believe tech companies should be less regulated than they are now. This percentage has increased since 2021, when Pew put this figure at 9%.
Liberals and conservatives may not agree on everything when it comes to tech policy, but the dominant perspective from this poll is clear: Americans are tired of the outsized influence of big tech companies.