Since last year, people's feelings about big technology have changed A new Pew Research Center study found that fewer and fewer people in the United States want more regulation of large technology companies This decline across the political spectrum shows that 44% of Americans favor more government regulation, compared with 56% of those surveyed last year.
This does not necessarily mean that they are all in favour of reducing regulation. For example, 32% of Liberal Democrats surveyed said the current amount of regulation was just good, compared with 23% in 2021. However, 27% of moderate or liberal Republicans support reducing regulation, higher than 13%; 36% of conservative Republicans also support reducing regulation, higher than 11%. Only 35% of conservative Republicans surveyed now want more regulation, down from 59% in 2021.
In 2018, after Facebook's Cambridge analytics scandal found that the company collected data on at least 50 million users without user permission, many people called for more regulation by the U.S. government, and Congress continued to question Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other technology leaders. Globally, this has triggered a backlash against big technology companies and many ideas on how to regulate them. In particular, the EU has been vigorously promoting a large-scale new antitrust law called digital Markets Act, but its implementation has been postponed until next year. In addition, it is also implementing old laws such as the general data protection regulations (gdpr), which makes technology companies more responsible for their business activities.
In addition, Pew's research also addresses a possible reason why Americans may loosen additional regulation: social networks are censoring popular views of speech. The survey shows that 77% of Americans surveyed now say that social media platforms tend to "deliberately censor" opposed political views, up from 73% in 2020, while 44% say that these platforms prefer liberal views to conservative views.
Twitter, Facebook and other platforms have been criticized by users as censorship, but potential new twitter owner Elon Musk has announced that he will take a more relaxed approach to the way the platform handles its content censorship.