Social Media Seen as Mostly Good for Democracy Across Many Nations, But U.S. is a Major Outlier

• Main Authors: Christine Huang, Janell Fetterolf, Laura Clancy, Laura Silver, Richard Wike, Sarah Austin
• Format: Report
• Language: English
• Published: Pew Research Center 2022
• Subjects: Civil Society; Computers and Technology; Government Reform; Northern Sweden
• Online Access: https://issuelab.org/resources/41469/41469.pdf; https://issuelab.org/permalink/resource/41469

As people across the globe have increasingly turned to Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and other platforms to get their news and express their opinions, the sphere of social media has become a new public space for discussing – and often arguing bitterly – about political and social issues. And in the mind of many analysts, social media is one of the major reasons for the declining health of democracy in nations around the world.However, as a new Pew Research Center survey of 19 advanced economies shows, ordinary citizens see social media as both a constructive and destructive component of political life, and overall most believe it has actually had a positive impact on democracy. Across the countries polled, a median of 57% say social media has been more of a good thing for their democracy, with 35% saying it has been a bad thing.There are substantial cross-national differences on this question, however, and the United States is a clear outlier: Just 34% of U.S. adults think social media has been good for democracy, while 64% say it has had a bad impact. In fact, the U.S. is an outlier on a number of measures, with larger shares of Americans seeing social media as divisive.