Think Social Media Is Bad for Democracy? The Rest of the World Is Starting to Agree
Across the 37 nations surveyed, a median of 55% still think social media has had a positive impact on democracy, while a median of 35% say it has had a negative one. America was the third most pessimistic country surveyed, with 64% saying it was bad for democracy. The share of people in Germany, Japan, Hungary and Poland who say it is bad has risen by 20 percentage points since 2022.
- ▪Across the 37 nations surveyed, a median of 55% still think social media has had a positive impact on democracy, while a median of 35% say it has had a negative one.
- ▪America was the third most pessimistic country surveyed, with 64% saying it was bad for democracy.
- ▪The share of people in Germany, Japan, Hungary and Poland who say it is bad has risen by 20 percentage points since 2022.
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| Original publisher | PCMag |
| Canonical URL | https://www.pcmag.com/news/think-social-media-is-bad-for-democracy-the-rest-of-the-world-is-starting |
| Publication time | Sun, 04 Oct 26 14:12:46 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-04T14:19:55.578Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-04T14:19:55.578Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
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| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
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| Cluster | k6ShDq5PoE_e · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
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| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
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| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
If you have your suspicions about the impact of social media on democracy, you're certainly not alone, and if you live in a wealthy nation, the average person is more likely to agree with you than they were a few years ago.According to research from the Pew Research Center, people across the world have developed much more negative opinions about the impact of social media on democracy since 2022. Across the 37 nations surveyed, a median of 55% still think social media has had a positive impact on democracy, while a median of 35% say it has had a negative one. America was the third most pessimistic country surveyed, with 64% saying it was bad for democracy.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at PCMag.
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