Facebook tops Supreme Court, Fox News in terms of favorability, new poll finds
Facebook is more popular than the U.S. Supreme Court, the CIA and several other government institutions, according to new polling.
In the latest Harvard CAPS Harris poll, the social media giant helmed by Mark Zuckerberg had the third-highest favorability rating out of 19 institutions, which included companies, countries and governments.
Meanwhile, X — Facebook’ s competitor — had one of the lowest favorability ratings, ranking just above China.
Conducted between Jan. 15-16, the poll sampled 2,650 registered voters and has a margin of error of 1.9 percentage points.
Breakdown of findings
The vast majority of respondents, 76%, had a favorable view toward the U.S. military, making it by far the most popular institution — a finding borne out in past polls. In contrast, just 12% had an unfavorable view.
The FBI came in second, with 51% of respondents signaling they had a favorable view and 31% saying they had a negative view.
Facebook, meanwhile, had a 50% favorability rating — nearly the same as the FBI. However, 37% of respondents said they had an unfavorable view toward the company.
Following Facebook were Homeland Security, Fox News and the CIA, which had favorability ratings of 48%, 46% and 45%, respectively.
Making up the middle of the pack were the Supreme Court (45%), NATO (44%), Ukraine (44%), Israel (42%), the Department of Justice (42%), CNN (40%) and the European Union (35%).
At the bottom, all with net negative favorability ratings, were a couple of U.S. media companies — and countries or governments with adversarial relations to the U.S.
X, formerly Twitter, and MSNBC were the fifth- and sixth-least favorable institutions — with 34% and 35% favorability ratings, respectively. And coming in last were China (15%), the Palestinian Authority (13%), Russia (10%) and Hamas (8%).
Significant shares of respondents also signaled they had no opinion or had not heard of these institutions.
The findings were largely in line with the results of a November Harvard CAPS Harris poll, in which the U.S. military, FBI and Facebook also had the highest favorability ratings.
This story was originally published January 23, 2025 at 1:08 PM with the headline "Facebook tops Supreme Court, Fox News in terms of favorability, new poll finds."