The real reason half of America supports the FBI over Apple

A recent finding by the Pew Research Center that half of Americans support the FBI over Apple in an ongoing duel over iPhone security produced a very lopsided response in my Twitter feed. And it looked nothing like the actual poll results. As I said, the discrepancy between Pew's results and the opposite reaction on social media could simply be a result of the kinds of people who follow tech writers on Twitter, a social network whose audience is pretty tech-friendly to begin with. But that isn't an argument for dismissing that reaction. In fact, I want to argue that there's something else at play here, and nothing sums it up better than this tweet: "No, Apple is fighting a war most Americans don't understand." What we're witnessing here is a peculiar artifact of technology polling that you don't get on social issues like abortion or religion, where convictions tend to remain rooted in ideology. Opinions about technology turn out to be very malleable, and in more ways than just how a survey question is phrased or how big the sample is. But how do we evaluate that?