There’s plenty of intrigue around Tuesday’s midterm elections, but this much is certain: social media will be a nightmare.
News outlets across the country are warning about the imminent deluge of misinformation, disinformation, conspiratorial thinking, and other distortions of the truth that will overwhelm social media. Conventional wisdom goes that Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms were woefully unprepared for the onslaught in 2020, and they remain unequipped to handle the torrent that’s about to hit.
These concerns are generally well-founded. The cesspool of political social media continues to operate with scattershot intervention from social media platforms, as the Washington Post, New York Times, and Bloomberg reported this week.
But while the American public seems well aware of social media’s pernicious effects on political discourse, don’t expect things to change anytime soon.
For all the handwringing among researchers and media members about social media companies undermining democracy, the American people are voting with their eyeballs. Rather than abandoning the platforms that fan the flames of fanaticism, more Americans are spending time on social media than ever before, generating more revenue for companies.
Consider the case of Facebook, arguably the greatest source of political disinformation during the last national election cycle.
In the fiscal quarter before the 2020 election, about 196 million people in the U.S. and Canada used the platform on a daily basis. In the two subsequent quarters, during which the U.S. held an election and witnessed a Facebook-fueled attack on the U.S. Capitol, the platform’s daily active user count held steady at 195 million in the two countries. (Facebook parent Meta doesn’t isolate U.S. data in its quarterly reports.)
Advertisers didn’t seem fazed by the fiasco, either. In the 2020 pre-election quarter, Facebook generated $39 in ad revenue per user in the U.S. and Canada. That number spiked to $51 in the final quarter of 2020, likely due in part to a surge in political ads. But it held steady throughout 2021, when each user generated about $53 in ad revenue for Facebook.
The same principles applied at Twitter, another major source of content moderation angst. Twitter’s monetizable daily active users in the U.S. have held steady at roughly 36 million to 38 million since the third quarter of 2020, while U.S. revenue jumped 45% between the third quarters of 2020 and 2021. Twitter stopped accepting paid political ads in 2019.
YouTube, another oft-cited amplifier of political misinformation, doesn’t report user and revenue data by country. But given that YouTube’s ad revenue has spiked from $5 billion in the third quarter of 2020 to $7 billion in the third quarter of 2022, it’s fair to assume American users aren’t boycotting the site out of election-related spite.
By now, Americans are well-versed in the ills of social media—and they simply don’t care enough to abandon it.
Last year, polling company Gallup and the journalism-focused nonprofit Knight Foundation surveyed more than 10,000 Americans and conducted focus groups on topics related to social media. The results showed 90% of respondents believed social media made it easier to spread misinformation, 77% said they don’t trust information seen on social media, and 76% agreed that it facilitated election interference.
What’s more, the Gallup survey showed Americans were virtually split on whether they thought Congress or the tech industry is better positioned to regulate social media content—a dynamic that contributes to Washington’s inaction on tech regulation. Separate Gallup polls suggest Americans rank both institutions among the least-trusted entities in public life.
“Across all [demographic] groups, focus group participants acknowledged that information overload is a drawback to the internet but that it is everyone’s responsibility to ‘do their own research’ to determine fact from fiction,” the report’s authors wrote.
Social media companies might very well be eroding the foundation of our liberal democracy via their free-for-all platforms. But until Americans abandon Facebook, Twitter, and their peers over their content policies, there’s no clear financial case for companies getting down deeper into the political mud.
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Jacob Carpenter
