Pew Research Center

The European Union and the United States are negotiating the most economically significant regional free trade agreement in history: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Publics in Germany and the United States support TTIP and trade expansion in general, especially with each other. But when it comes to specifics, both Americans and Germans oppose many details of this far-reaching initiative. Moreover, they disagree with one another on making transatlantic regulatory standards similar.

And, in the United States, there is a striking generation gap in attitudes relating to TTIP.

For instance, roughly eight-in-ten Americans under age 30 also back the idea of making product and service standards as similar as possible between the US and EU, perhaps not surprising given the fact that this generation is far less trusting than their parents and grandparents of the US government’s ability to set strong safety and privacy standards. A significant share (85%) of Germans prefers European regulation of data privacy, trusting more in their own government’s capacity in this realm than in US regulation.

And, in the United States, men, the young, those with a college degree and high-income persons disproportionately lack faith in American standards protecting their data’s confidentiality. Overall, roughly half (49%) of Americans trust US privacy standards. But only about four-in-ten high-income Americans (39%) share that trust compared with nearly six-in-ten low-income people (58%), a 19 percentage point difference in views. There is a similar 14 point divide on the issue between those who have graduated from college (39%) and those without a college degree (53%).

In this study of US Internet traffic to 26 of the most popular news websites, direct visitors -- those who type in the news outlet’s specific address (URL) or have the address bookmarked -- spend much more time on that news site, view many more pages of content and come back far more often than visitors who arrive from a search engine or a Facebook referral.

The data also suggest that turning social media or search eyeballs into equally dedicated readers is no easy task. These are among the key findings that detail how 1 million people enrolled in one of the nation’s most popular commercial Internet panels have been connecting through their desktop and laptop computers with the most accessed or shared news sites of our time.

An analysis by Pew Research of three months of comScore data finds that among users coming to these news sites through a desktop or laptop computer, direct visitors spend, on average, 4 minutes and 36 seconds per visit. That is roughly three times as long as those who wind up on a news media website through a search engine (1 minute 42 seconds) or from Facebook (1 minute 41 seconds). Direct visitors also view roughly five times as many pages per month (24.8 on average) as those coming via Facebook referrals (4.2 pages) or through search engines (4.9 pages). And they visit a site three times as often (10.9) as Facebook and search visitors.