Remember how, in late 2018, the Financial Times declared “techlash” — the backlash against the giant U.S. technology companies and all they represent — word of the year?

To judge by the amount of negative publicity the companies continue to generate, techlash is still with us — but as far as both markets and users are concerned, it’s an empty word.

Every year since at least 2018, Facebook Inc. has led the S&P 500 companies in the number of days it faced negative news sentiment (1), and Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Twitter Inc. have been in the top 10.

In 2018 and 2019, Facebook was the S&P 500 company with the most days when its stock price rose despite negative news sentiment. In 2020 and 2021, Google took over the top spot, with Facebook directly behind.

Since the start of 2018, Twitter’s market capitalization has increased by a factor of 2.8, Google’s by 2.6, and Facebook’s has doubled.

Arguably, the market has been reacting to the companies’ stellar financials — Google’s net income, for example, has grown by more than 30% a year during this time, and Facebook’s profit growth has averaged more than 40% — rather than to all the negative coverage.

Ordinary users, meanwhile, have grown to regard the tech whales as evil. This year’s Edelman Trust Barometer showed the lowest-ever public confidence in technology companies, at 68% compared with 76% in 2017; in the U.S., trust in tech is even lower at 57%.

You can’t easily reconcile these trust levels with the user numbers that the tech companies report to investors. Facebook says it has 1.9 billion daily active users, up 460 million since the first quarter of 2018; Twitter has 206 million, up 86 million.

If users really considered the tech leaders evil, they’d abandon them in droves.

When regulators take action against Big Tech, they understandably react to media reports — that barrage of negative news sentiment. The media, however, are Big Tech’s direct competitors in battles for audience attention and advertising dollars; I’d argue that we journalists are naturally motivated to consider Google, Facebook, even Twitter evil, no matter how objective we try to appear. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m biased in my thinking about them: These companies have all but ruined the professional world and the industry in which I started out and which I came to understand and love. Most officials and politicians grew up in my world, too; to them, reacting to sustained media sentiment like the kind that has developed around Big Tech is a matter of long practice.

Yet when it comes to ordinary users, the professional media are yet another increasingly unreliable source. We may gloat about the falling trust in the social media, but the same Edelman Trust Barometer shows the lowest confidence in traditional media since at least 2012 — 53% globally, down from 63% in 2018, at the beginning of “techlash”; 59% of respondents say that journalists intentionally mislead them and that they are more interested in pushing ideologies than in reporting facts. With majorities feeling that way, no wonder people don’t attach much importance to media attacks on tech.

Given the news climate and regulators’ behavior, tech companies are, of course, among the biggest lobbying spenders. According to OpenSecrets, Facebook spent $19.7 million last year and $9.6 million so far this year on lobbying.

I’m in constant search of alternatives to the tech giants’ services. I’ve replaced them everywhere I could, and I’ll replace the services I’m still using as soon as comparable alternatives become available. Yet I have no illusions about people like me undermining Big Tech’s market power in any meaningful way.

Leonid Bershidsky is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation team based in Berlin. He was previously Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist.