• by Joe Mandese , April 15, 2025

The percentage of Americans who believe the government should take more of a role in restricting false information online has fallen to its latest point since 2018, the last time Donald Trump was president, according to new data released by Pew Research Center today.

Coincidentally, that correlates with a precipitous decline among Republican/Republican-leaning voters, although there has even been a drop among Democratic/Democratic-leaning ones from their height in 2023.

And while there also has been a precipitous drop among Americans who believe tech companies should take more responsibility for curtailing misinformation online, most of that drop has come from Democrats, not Republicans (see below).

The drop follows the capitulation of tech company CEOs -- especially Meta's Mark Zuckerberg -- to placate the new Trump Administration, as well as the administration's war on fact-based truth, and should be alarming, particularly the part about Democrats.

I'm not sure what to attribute that to. Maybe it's just malaise as the party's voters reset themselves, or maybe it's a sign of resignation. But if anything, they should be up in arms.

It's not just the pressure the new administration has been putting on tech companies, but its push to overhaul regulations -- especially the FTC and FCC -- its continuing attacks on fact-based news organizations (even barring AP from White House press access for refusing to rename the Gulf of Mexico), as well as Trump's executive orders to defund academia, and not public broadcasting (despite the fact that two-thirds of Americans still consider NPR and PBS among their most trusted sources of information).

These findings also follow recent Pew studies showing the percentage of Americans getting their news from actual journalists falling to an all-time low, with the percentage getting it from so-called "news influencers" on social media hitting an all-time high.

And while it's not a U.S. trend line, per se, WARC this morning released an alarming analysis of global ad spending supporting print and online news brands.

"Globally, news brand ad spend is forecast to fall to $32.3 billion this year, a 33.1% decrease from 2019 and is forecast to remain flat through 2026," WARC notes, adding, "For magazine brands, spend is forecast at $3.7b billion in 2025, a 38.6% slump since 2019."

As troubling as that trend should be to anyone who cares about the economic viability of fact-based news reporting, it's one of the reasons that WARC cites that should be really troubling:

"Alongside content and safety concerns, brands are favoring global digital platforms like Google and Meta for targeted, scalable ads," WARC explains, meaning that questionable digital information platforms are taking share from unquestionably factual ones.

It also comes as agents of disinformation continuing to attack brands and agencies that support legitimate news outlets and shift money away from toxic misinformation online, especially Elon Musk, who continues to sue the World Federation of Advertisers and big brands for pulling money off of X, despite the fact that the WFA has already shuttered the GARM (Global Alliance for Responsible Media).