Axios Poll: Facebook Favorability Plunges 28 Points

Support for Facebook has plummeted following revelations about the misuse of user data, a new poll conducted for Axios confirmed on Monday.

According to SurveyMonkey, Facebook has dropped 28 points since October of last year in a poll about its favorability rating, far more than technology giants Amazon, Google and Apple.

• Facebook favorability fell from 61 percent in October 2017 to 48 percent in March 2018.
• Google favorability fell from 76 percent to 64 percent.
• Amazon favorability fell from 72 percent to 59 percent.
• Apple favorability fell from 50 percent to 40 percent.

"In October, Facebook had more positive than negative ratings by about 2-1; now it's ... 48 percent favorable, 43 percent unfavorable," SurveyMonkey notes.

The Axios/SurveyMonkey poll was conducted from March 21-23 with 2,878 adults in the U.S., with a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points.

Facebook has seen its credibility rocked by reports that the consulting company Cambridge Analytica gained access to the personal data of 50 million users, and that the social media giant has known of the breach since 2015.

"You may have heard about a quiz app built by a university researcher that leaked Facebook data of millions of people in 2014," read an ad signed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg that ran in multiple newspapers, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the U.K.'s The Observer. "This was a breach of trust, and I'm sorry we didn't do more at the time. We're now taking steps to ensure this doesn't happen again."

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