Facebook's popularity has plunged dramatically


Americans increasingly dislike and distrust Facebook, two new polls from Axios/Survey Monkey and Reuters/Ipsos reveal.
The Axios survey found Facebook's net favorability has dropped by 28 percent since October. As of this month, the social network's net favorability, the gap between approval and disapproval, is still barely positive at just 5 percent. Other tech giants, including Amazon, Google, Apple, Twitter, and Microsoft, also saw their favorability drop by smaller amounts over the five-month span — though with the exception of Twitter, they both started and ended in a more positive place than Facebook.
Meanwhile, only 41 percent of Americans told Reuters they trust Facebook to obey privacy laws when handling their personal information. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all scored at least 60 percent trust on this point.
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Facebook chiefs Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg have said they know they are facing "an issue of trust" and are at a "critical moment for our company." About 2 in 3 Americans have a Facebook account.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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