• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, May 5, 2016

While millennials are generally pro-technology and big fans of media, it will come as no surprise that this warm embrace does not extend to advertising, and especially messages in their social media feeds. That’s according to a new survey of 2,500 teens and adults conducted by Harris Poll on behalf of Lithium Technologies, which found that a majority of young adults dislike ads in their social media feeds.

Overall 74% of respondents ages 16-39 said they don’t like to be targeted by brands in their social media feeds. Furthermore, 56% of the respondents said they have limited their social media use in response to the proliferation of ads – a troubling finding not only for advertisers but for social networks themselves, which are grappling with the difficult task of balancing user experience and monetization.

Across the board, respondents ranging from teens to baby boomers were also skeptical about social networks as a source of product information, expressing less trust in social networks than sites like Amazon and Yelp. For teens and millennials, 53% said they trust social networks for consumer information, compared to 85% for the latter; for Gen X and baby boomers, just 29% said they trusted social networks, compared to 66% for the sites with product reviews.

Although they don’t like the ads and don’t trust them for reliable information, most respondents do treat social networks as channels for customer service issues, and their expectations here are fairly demanding: 71% of baby boomers, 72% of Gen X, and 79% of millennials said brands should be able to respond within a day to a customer question or complaint.

The low levels of trust in social networks apparently goes beyond products and services, extending to news. Recently I wrote about another survey of 2,014 U.S. adults, conducted by the Media Insight Project, a joint initiative from the American Press Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, which found Americans don’t trust the news they get on social media.

While just over half of Americans (51%) say they get news from social media like Facebook, just 12% of those who do so say they trust news from Facebook “a great deal,” while 60% trust it “somewhat” and 28% “a little” or not at all.