A majority of Americans said they believe content deemed hateful or violent should be censored on social media platforms like Facebook, according to a new American Barometer poll.
The survey, conducted by Hill.TV and the HarrisX polling company, found that 62 percent of respondents picked “content that is considered hateful or violent should be censored on social media platforms,” when asked “Which is closest to your view about social media platforms like Facebook?”
Public opinion analyst Karlyn Bowman told Hill.TV’s Joe Concha that the results of the poll could have been impacted by the phrasing.
“I think people usually do consider censorship a bad thing but I also think that when you use words like ‘violence’ in a question wording, that probably pulls people in one direction, and I think it probably did in your poll,” Bowman noted.
The poll comes after Facebook took down four pages belonging to right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones after facing a barrage of public pressure.
Twitter also took action against Jones on Tuesday and blocked him from tweeting from his personal account for one week, saying one of his posts violated the platform’s policies.
Facebook has been under pressure to ban Jones’ website InfoWars in an effort to combat misinformation.
Supporters of Jones have argued that the move constitutes censorship, and was politically motivated.
Jones and InfoWars have stoked various unfounded theories, such as that the U.S. government carried out the 9/11 attacks.
He is also facing a series of legal challenges for claiming that the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary was a hoax.
The American Barometer poll was conducted on August 12-13 among 999 registered voters. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
— Julia Manchester
Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.