Survey of 852 US college students shows 51% say the government should do more to regulate major tech companies and 77% think social media has “too much” power
Context & Ripple Effects
This survey slots into a five-year climb in anti-Big Tech sentiment that Axios itself has been tracking: back in February 2018, only 40% of adults wanted government regulation of big tech, before jumping to 55% favoring regulation within months. By late 2018, a separate Axios survey found a 15-point spike in adults fearing big tech would escape sufficient oversight.
The January 2021 student numbers land between two heavier data points: eight months later, a Wall Street Journal poll found 80% of voters wanting the government to do everything it can to curb tech giants, and by April 2024 Pew recorded 78% of adults saying social media companies hold too much political power. The college cohort's 77% 'too much power' figure suggests the sentiment is generational, not just a reaction to one news cycle.
First-order effects
- Major social media platforms now face a coming-of-age cohort — 852 college students — where a clear majority (77%) already views their power as excessive, meaning future graduates arrive in the workforce and electorate pre-sold on constraint.
- With 51% of students backing more government action, lawmakers courting young voters gain polling cover to campaign on tech regulation rather than treat it as an electoral liability.
Second-order effects
- Platforms' Washington lobbying and PR budgets come under pressure to justify themselves: if even their youngest user base favors regulation, the argument that crackdowns are elite overreach loses force.
- Competing platforms and smaller entrants can position lighter-touch governance as a differentiator against incumbents whose scale is precisely what respondents cite as 'too much' power.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — from 40% regulatory support in late 2017-era polling to majority-plus across students, voters, and adults by 2024 — tech regulation shifts from partisan wedge to structural consensus, making some form of platform oversight a baseline expectation rather than a policy fight.
- Sustained supermajority concern about social media's power (77% among students, 84% of voters nervous about kids) points toward child-safety and platform-power rules becoming the entry point through which broader tech regulation gets legislated.
The trend: US public support for reining in Big Tech has risen steadily since 2018 and now spans generations, moving platform regulation from fringe demand toward bipartisan default.