People Trust Social Media Less Than Any Other Form of Communication

And here's why we still use them anyway.

No matter how much Facebook messes with our emotions and pressures us to give up our data to their advertisers, they’ve hardly done anything serious enough to drive us away. Most people trump it up to apathy — we don’t care how much we’re violated if we get to use the service for free. But a new study poses another possible answer.

Last week, Pew Research Center released a report on privacy in the “post-Snowden era” and how Americans see government surveillance, social media sites and advertisers. Unsurprisingly, 91 percent of everyone surveyed believe “consumers have lost control over how personal information is collected and used by companies.”

In the report, Pew gathered a number of factlets without pulling them together for the key insight about why we still use social media sites even though we know they’re taking and selling our information to advertisers.

No one trusts social media

Across all channels of communication — including texts, emails, cell phone calls, landlines and instant messaging clients — social media came out as the leading champion of distrust, and the only method of communication that a majority of people gave the condemnation of “not at all secure.”

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