As Americans lose trust in the institutions that shape their lives, from government to tech giants, what do digital marketers need to know?

There are a lot of shortcomings in the American history curriculum, though failing to cover the Luddites, a group of early 19th century British textile workers who protested technology – not out of fear of the technology itself, but out of fear capital would leverage that technology to immiserate labor – can hardly be counted against the curriculum. After all, the Luddites were British; they don’t necessarily belong in a history curriculum focused stateside. Yet, over 200 years later, many Americans – especially younger ones – subscribe to the very tenets the Luddite movement stood for, distrusting the very technology they rely upon as they see it making their world worse. Digital Luddism is an emerging trend, and one any brand – be it a product, destination or candidate – needs to grapple with if it’s going to succeed.

We are at a nadir of trust when it comes to how Americans feel about the institutions that shape their lives. Sure, all the oxygen is getting sucked out of the room by the upcoming presidential election, but the mistrust both predates the 2024 election and is far more widespread than merely politics. Point of fact, this has been getting worse for a while and the election is only going to exacerbate it.

It wasn’t always this bad. We can lean on a lot of longitudinal polling to see the dramatic shift in attitudes over the last decade plus. This isn’t so much a history lesson as it is calling back on some memories that all of us have.

Our first stop can be 2012 – barely a decade ago. Courtesy of a Washington Post-Schar School poll, we can see that Americans were once optimistic about our digital age.

Net neutrality ruled the day. Americans were cutting the cord en masse, moving off of cable and beginning to rely on over-the-top streaming services as their primary means of consumption. Better still for the consumer, these services weren’t particularly ad laden. Amazon Prime Video joined Hulu and Netflix in 2011, and with those three services, Americans had access to basically whatever they wanted. Small wonder that by a 3:2 margin, Americans didn’t want the government intervening in any of this – the internet provided a great deal of freedom and access.

A decade later, that’s not the environment in which we live. No longer can we cut the cord and rely on the “big three” streamers. There’s HBO, Paramount, Disney+, Peacock, and so on; our media landscape is entirely balkanized. It’s also festooned with advertising; Amazon’s rollout of ad-supported media is only the most recent blow, following suit with Netflix. Meanwhile, Americans are giving their data out to multiple platforms on multiple avenues, and there’ve been a ton of data breaches. Even a company whose stock in trade should allow them to prevent breaches, Equifax, got in on the failures. Americans, distrustful of government, nevertheless want the government to intervene in a landscape that no longer seems safe for the average consumer. In less than a decade, attitudes have shifted from roughly 3:2 against to almost 2:1 in favor of the government getting more involved in internet privacy.

Of course, this isn’t just a story of “Americans saw their data get breached, are tired of having to subscribe to multiple services, and generally feel worse than they used to.” Americans dislike the very sites that underpin most of the internet. Google, for example, enjoys its company name being synonymous with “searching for something on the internet” the same way that Xerox is synonymous with making copies. But in recent years, Americans don’t trust Google – its core product is unquestionably worse than it used to be.

Courtesy of Utah State University’s tech poll, we can see that American trust in the “Big 3” sites (Twitter/X is included here as an afterthought; it enjoys an outsized presence among journalists but has never been a meaningful traffic driver even prior to Elon Musk’s ruinous stewardship) is underwater:

Google and Amazon enjoy better trust scores than Facebook (there’s a reason Congress seems to annually haul Mark Zuckerberg out for questioning; Facebook is one of the few opportunities Congress has to punch down at a more disliked entity), but they’re also underwater. Americans, distrustful of government, nevertheless think life would be better if that very government intervened to break up these giants perceived as having broken the public trust.

In some cases, one might be able to point at a proximal cause for distrust. Perhaps the Cambridge Analytica scandal on Facebook turned sentiment against Zuckerberg’s creation. Perhaps former President Donald Trump using Twitter as the world’s weirdest bully pulpit soured sentiment. I suspect it’s no single instance that caused the mistrust, though – rather, it’s that these services are all kind of shitty, and they’ve all gotten shittier over time. It certainly fits the pattern of “enshittification” that Cory Doctorow coined.

Let’s take Amazon, the least mistrusted of the companies listed above. Have you tried shopping for something there lately? A search for most anything is going to get a bunch of promoted products at the top of your feed, forcing you to scroll down several screens before you can get to something that actually surfaced organically. Even then, there’s no guarantee a product you buy will arrive, or arrive as advertised: in their haste to get big, Amazon has proven a fertile breeding ground for scammers. This environment doesn’t do anyone much good: consumers have a hard time trusting that Amazon is a reliable marketplace. Sellers who’d act in good faith are forced to race to the bottom in pricing and promotion in order to beat out less-than-reputable competition in order to get their products seen by potential buyers. An environment where both buyer and seller are dissatisfied with the marketplace will only hurt Amazon in the long run. Enshittification comes for everyone – including the platform itself.

We can see this on Google as well. Compare the following two searches that are identical, save for inserting the word “reddit” into the end of one search in an attempt to find user-generated content rather than paid promotion:

Reddit has seen an enormous increase in traffic over the last year, most of it from Google. It’s not that Reddit in and of itself is particularly more popular, but rather because users are so disgusted with Google’s default search results that they’re seeding their search string with something that’s an explicit request for “find me user-generated content, not advertising.” Indeed, the search that uses “Reddit” at least gets some user-generated content, albeit content that still appears beneath the advertising river. It’s worth noting that the coffee makers that appear in the two screenshots aren’t identical; some of these brands have responded to users’ requests for less advertising by including Reddit as a search term, chasing the very users who’ve made their distaste already known. One can only imagine that users find these tactics distasteful and that they further contribute to distrust of Google.

The decrease in trust in these tech institutions isn’t anything new to American life. Gallup surveys trust in a variety of institutions annually, and literally everything they surveyed is viewed as worse now than it was previously. But it’s the tech giants that have the biggest deltas, shifting from fairly decent numbers to “we hate Facebook and Twitter more than we hate even Congress” territory.

All of which is to say: If you’re trying to reach an American with advertising, you’re doing so starting from a place of mistrust. Because so much of the Internet advertising game (72%!) is wrapped up in Google and Facebook, any brand wishing to do business is virtually forced to use a platform that predisposes users to mistrust that brand. In short, Americans in 2024 are behaving as the Luddites did in the early 1800s – justifiably hating technology they see as having made their life worse and the rich ever richer.

So how does one reach these “digital Luddites?” It’s not a question easily answered. But working with niche influencers might be one way to accomplish this. Smaller, niche influencers might not command the widespread reach of their larger counterparts, but they’re also trusted within their niche and can offer a brand the credibility and authenticity that trafficking to a wide audience via Facebook or Google simply cannot. This also means that brands need to think more deeply about their analytics reporting – it’s not enough to just see numbers of impressions or conversions go up; if digital Luddites are a significant portion of a brand’s audience, short-term results could come at the expense of long-term trust. Thus, brand perception studies seem more important than ever if a brand is going to grow sustainably and not alienate its customers.

None of this means any brand should divest of Facebook and Google entirely. The platforms are simply too big to be entirely ignored. It does mean, though, that any successful campaign needs to view those platforms as a supplement rather than the main course – and that means diversifying the platforms on which one reaches an audience. Digital marketing has never been easy, and an increase in digital Luddism only makes our jobs harder. Keep in mind, though, that these digital Luddites – like their British predecessors – have been mostly correct in their fears about technology, and that if one is to reach them with any level of credibility, it needs to be on their terms.