Verge Tech 2021 survey – the Verge

During a year of isolation, fear, disease and death, the tech industry has provided many ways for people to stay connected. It has also made Americans very aware of their reliance on big tech companies. So, have our attitudes towards them changed?

From 2017, The edge conducted periodic polls to gauge Americans’ attitudes toward the big tech industry; our most recent was released in the fall of 2019, just before life was turned upside down by the novel coronavirus.

While the pandemic has changed American life a lot, our findings show that it has most definitely not changed our feelings about tech companies. There are, however, a few exceptions:

• Thirteen percent of those familiar with the brand had a negative opinion of Amazon, down from just 9 percent in 2020.
• The estimate of Facebook and Twitter also fell among people who know them – with 34% saying they have unfavorable opinions on Facebook, up from 29% in 2020, and 42 saying they have unfavorable opinions on Twitter, up from 39% in 2020.
• More people said Apple was having a negative impact on society, but that still only represented 9% of those surveyed who know the brand, up from 5% in 2020. Facebook and Twitter were also more likely to be seen as bad. for society among those who recognized it. marks.
• Among people who don’t use Facebook, 43% avoid it because they don’t like the way it works, a jump from 27% in the last poll.

These are surprisingly significant changes in just a year. 2020 was a record year of profitability for Amazon, as more and more people relied on it during the pandemic.

We added a new company, TikTok, to our survey this year: 31% of people who recognized the brand say it is having a negative impact on our company. What’s more, it’s the brand people are most wary of when it comes to personal information, with 64% of respondents saying they don’t trust it. Facebook and Instagram are the second and third most trusted brands for personal information; in both cases, a majority of respondents indicated that they felt the brands were not trustworthy.

There is also increased interest in dismantling Big Tech. This year, 61% of our respondents said the government should split tech companies if they get too big; last year, only 56 percent of people said this. Perhaps the pandemic has made it clear how much we rely on these companies – and how they can change our lives in the blink of an eye.

These are among the findings of the third Edge Technological Confidence Survey. This survey was conducted in August among 1,200 nationally representative people in the United States. The sample error is ± 3% at a 95% confidence level.