A new survey of American adults found the majority believe social media platforms do more harm than good.
The NBC News survey, conducted in mid-April, showed 64% of the 1,000 respondents said social media does more to divide Americans than bring us together, while only 27% said it brings us together.
Politically, that breaks down to 77% of Republicans, 54% of Democrats, and 65% of independents saying social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are divisive. Seventy percent of white respondents and 65% of Latinos agreed.
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Black participants, though, were more evenly split, with 42% saying social media is more divisive and 40% claiming it’s more unifying.
The survey also found 61% of young adults and 71% of seniors said social media sites are doing more to fracture the country than bring it together.
Among those who utilize social media at least once per day, 49% said it enhances their lives, while 37% said the behavior worsens their lives. Thirty-two percent of all respondents claimed social media makes their lives better, while 24% said it makes their lives worse.
A majority of parents — 54% — said the pandemic has increased the amount of time their children spend on computers, smartphones, tablets, and TVs.
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Nielsen, which tracks media trends, found in April 2020, just one month after the lockdown measures were put in place, that social media usage exploded — a spike that came just as more tech companies were grappling with the damage of social media overuse.
To put that into perspective, Americans streamed 50,000 years worth of media in just one day (April 4), Disney+ exceeded it’s four-year projection of 90 million subscribers in just 14 months, Netflix surpassed 200 million subscribers at the end of the year, visits to the video app TikTok increased by nearly 600%, and daily Facebook traffic spiked 27% by June of last year.