No one's suggesting that it should. He's just pointing out that if you ask people "is X socially acceptable?" then the results may be quite different from if you ask "do you accept X?", and they may well be less interesting or useful.
Imagine a society consisting of 40% Prudes, who disapprove of everything, and 60% Libertines, who disapprove of nothing. And suppose that people in this society are well informed about one another's opinions. Then if you ask "Do you approve of goat-fettling?" you'll get 60% yes, 40% no; but if you ask "Is goat-fettling socially acceptable?" you'll get 100% yes, 0% no, because everyone knows that most people approve.
Now suppose that the media in our hypothetical society aren't perfectly accurate and unbiased; they somehow give everyone the impression that there are more Prudes and fewer Libertines. This doesn't make any difference to the result of the "do you approve?" survey, but it may change the result of the "is it socially acceptable?" survey to 0% yes, 100% no because now everyone "knows" that most people disapprove.
(How relevant all this is to the present survey, I don't know, because my Danish isn't up to working out just what questions they actually asked.)
According to the article the question was something I would translate to: "To what degree do you accept piracy of music from the internet on a scale from 1 to 10. Not at all accepting = 1. Sceptical = 2-6. Accepts it = 7-10"
Imagine a society consisting of 40% Prudes, who disapprove of everything, and 60% Libertines, who disapprove of nothing. And suppose that people in this society are well informed about one another's opinions. Then if you ask "Do you approve of goat-fettling?" you'll get 60% yes, 40% no; but if you ask "Is goat-fettling socially acceptable?" you'll get 100% yes, 0% no, because everyone knows that most people approve.
Now suppose that the media in our hypothetical society aren't perfectly accurate and unbiased; they somehow give everyone the impression that there are more Prudes and fewer Libertines. This doesn't make any difference to the result of the "do you approve?" survey, but it may change the result of the "is it socially acceptable?" survey to 0% yes, 100% no because now everyone "knows" that most people disapprove.
(How relevant all this is to the present survey, I don't know, because my Danish isn't up to working out just what questions they actually asked.)