New Poll Details Voters’ Distrust of Big Tech, Big Government

Never, in the history of mankind, has such immense, incalculable power been in the hands of so few.

New poll details voters’ distrust of Big Tech, big government

By Samuel Chamberlain, NY Post, June 26, 2021 |

Most American voters believe that five tech giants, including Facebook and Google, have too much power — but even more think the federal government has a surplus of sway, according to a new poll.

A Fox News survey of 1,001 registered voters found that 63 percent believe Facebook has too much power. By comparison, 68 percent of respondents said they believe the federal government has too much power and 65 percent said they think the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has too much power.

Voters aren’t much more fond of other Big Tech mainstays, with 55 percent believing Google has too much power, 53 percent saying Twitter has too much power and 52 percent saying the same about Apple. Fifty-one percent of respondents said that Amazon has too much power, the same percentage who said the FBI is too powerful.

Paradoxically, the vast majority of respondents say that they have either a Facebook account (70 percent), an Amazon account (76 percent), or a Google account (81 percent), though the percentage of Facebook users is down four percentage points from 2018.

Despite the widespread use of social media companies, a whopping 69 percent of respondents said they don’t trust those firms to make “fair decisions” about what information is posted on their platforms, compared to just 26 percent who said they do.

Possibly due to mistrust of the federal government, most voters don’t want the tech giants to be broken up, with one exception: 53 percent of respondents said Facebook should be dismantled, while just 46 percent said the same of Amazon, Apple and Google.

Lawmakers from both parties have long had Facebook and Twitter in their crosshairs, with Democrats accusing them of doing nothing to stop the spread of misinformation that they believe contributed to Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election. Republicans have accused both platforms of anti-conservative bias and of restricting the reach of accounts that they deem to be “misinformation” (a process known as “shadow-banning”), even while allowing representatives of totalitarian regimes like Iran and China to spread lies indiscriminately.  

Last fall, Twitter prevented its users from sharing The Post’s bombshell reporting on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, which exposed the now-first son’s business dealings in Ukraine and China. Twitter even went so far as to lock The Post out of its own account, citing a policy against sharing hacked materials despite there being no evidence that the materials were hacked.

On Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee narrowly approved the last piece of a legislation package meant to prevent big tech companies from using their reach to throttle competitors.

The legislation requires tech giants to sell lines of business they run on their platforms if they also compete against them; show that potential mergers are legal rather than require antitrust enforcers prove they are not, and allow users to transfer their data elsewhere.

The legislation’s future in a closely divided House and Senate is unclear, but House Republicans have said they intend to introduce their own legislation to combat alleged anti-conservative bias by social media companies.