It’s impossible to determine which social media platform has done the most damage to mankind, as Facebook and Twitter are just so very close, but it’s hard to deny that Facebook had been making a strong push over the last week or so. First, a story came out that a consulting group working with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign used an app to secretly get away with information from the Facebook profiles of 50 million users, a breach that Facebook supposedly knew about for a long time without telling anyone, and then Mark Zuckerberg issued a bad semi-apology that nobody seemed to enjoy.
As it turns out, this whole thing resulted in a lot of people losing their faith in Facebook (including one famous rich guy who will go unnamed), to the extent that a new Reuters poll (via Deadline)has determined that only 41 percent of regular users actually trust the site with their personal data. That’s significantly lower than other big websites, as 66 percent of people said they trust Amazon, 62 person said they trust Google, and 60 percent said they trust Microsoft. People even trust Yahoo more than Facebook, and it allowed hackers to compromise the data of 3 billion users—which is technically worse than what Facebook did.
The poll was conducted just a few days after the news about Facebook’s data breach came out, so there’s a chance the numbers were dragged down a bit by the freshness of the wounds. Or maybe we’re all finally realizing that Facebook is awful and we’d all be better off writing letters to our old high school friends about their political opinions.