76 Percent of Americans Says Facebook Makes Society Worse: CNN Poll

The majority of American adults think that Facebook is bad for society, according to a new CNN poll.

CNN correspondent Donie O’Sullivan discussed the results of the poll on CNN Newsroom with hosts Erica Hill and Jim Sciutto Wednesday morning.

Sciutto introduced the poll results, commenting that “about half of the population knows someone who now believes in misinformation because of the site.”

“Does Facebook really care about polling and surveys like this?” asked Hill. “Are they going to look at this and say, oh, that’s a problem?”

Sullivan replied that he believed it was important for news organizations like CNN to do polling on this topic “because Facebook always points to their own internal data” to justify the use of their algorithms and the way their platform was structured.

“Our polling shows a bit of a different story,” Sullivan continued, “where people are seeing content regularly they don’t want to see, they don’t like.”

Sullivan highlighted another question from the poll, which asked respondents who was more at fault for Facebook making society worse. Fifty-five percent blamed “the way some people use Facebook” and 45 percent blamed “the way Facebook itself is run.”

Nearly half (49 percent) said they knew someone who had been persuaded by content on Facebook to believe in a conspiracy theory, a figure which Sullivan noted meant tens of millions of people knew someone like that.

“We have spoken to many, many people who have found themselves, loved ones, down rabbit holes of disinformation whether it’s about vaccines, whether it’s about the election, or something else.”

“I see it in my own Facebook feed, people I know,” replied Sciutto. “Outright disinformation.”

The polling memo from SSRS Opinion Panel stated that the survey was taken by web and telephone surveys of a nationally representative sample of 1,004 Americans 18 years of age or older from November 1 to 4. The margin of error was +/-4.0 percent with 95 percent confidence level.

Watch the video above, via CNN.

This post has been updated to reflect that Erica Hill, not Poppy Harlow, was co-anchoring CNN Newsroom.