According to an NBC News poll, the majority of Americans think that social media platforms do more to divide the citizens of the United States than they do to bring people together.
The data showed that 64% of respondents said that social media does more to divide us, while 27% of respondents said that social media does more to bring us together. As reported by NBC News, “that includes majorities of Republicans (77 percent), independents (65 percent) and Democrats (54 percent), as well as majorities of whites (70 percent), Latinos (56 percent), young adults (61 percent) and seniors (71 percent).”
The outlet stated, “Notably, Black respondents are the one demographic split on this question, with 42 percent saying it’s more divisive, while 40 percent say it’s more unifying.”
The poll showed that among respondents who said they use social media at least once per day, 49% of respondents said that it makes their lives better, while 37% of daily social media users said that social media makes their lives worse. Among all adults responding to the poll (rather than only those who use social media each day), 32% said that social media makes their lives better, while 24% said that it makes their lives worse.
Overall, 66% of respondents said they use social media at least once a day, while 69% answered the same way in March 2019. In April 2021, the poll showed that 41% of respondents said that they have made an effort to limit the amount of time they use their smart phone in the last year or two. When asked the same question in March 2019, 48% of respondents said they had made an effort to limit smart phone use.
Respondents who have children in the home were asked about the effect the pandemic has had on the amount of time their child “spends on a computer, tablet or iPad, mobile phones, video games, or watching TV.” They were asked if it “has […] increased, decreased, or stayed about the same” aside from virtual learning. 54% of respondents said that their child’s time on screens has increased, whereas 4% of respondents said it had decreased, and 38% said that it had stayed the same.
Participants were also asked if their time spent “on a computer, tablet or iPad, mobile phones, video games, or watching TV has […] increased, decreased, or stayed about the same” during the pandemic over the last year, not including video conference calls required for work. Of the respondents, 43% said that their time had increased while 49% said it had stayed about the same.
Of those who said the time had increased, respondents were asked how many more minutes or hours on an average day they spend “on a computer, tablet or iPad, mobile phones, video games, or watching TV” compared to a year ago. The data showed that the average time increased 169 minutes while the median time increased 120 minutes.
According to Statista, a March 2020 survey showed that social media users in the United States believed that social media usage would increase because of the home isolation that occurred from the coronavirus pandemic. The survey showed that “43.1 percent of respondents stated that if confined to their homes during the coronavirus, they would use Instagram more during that period. YouTube and Facebook were also popular social platforms that users were estimating to increase their usage during physical distancing at home.”
As reported by Vox in March 2021, “Americans spent on average 82 minutes per day on social media in 2020, a seven-minute jump from 2019 and a large upward revision from eMarketer’s original forecast. The media measurement firm previously estimated that time spent on social media would remain the same. But in 2020, concerns about screen time — and ‘time well spent’ — went out the window.”