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
The next generation of college-educated Americans thinks social media companies have too much power and influence …
Context & Ripple Effects
This poll lands mid-arc in a measurable shift in American attitudes toward big tech. By early 2018, support for government regulation had already climbed to 55% of adults, up from 40% just months earlier (Axios's February 2018 poll), and by that November a 15-point spike in one year left 55% fearing insufficient regulation. The January 2021 student survey extends that pattern to the cohort about to enter the workforce and electorate.
What makes the 852-student sample notable is its composition: these are college-educated respondents whose views historically predict where broader opinion moves next. The later data bears that out — by September 2021, [[a:971017|80% of voters told the Wall Street Journal the government should do everything it can to curb tech giants]], and by 2024 Pew found 78% of adults saying social media companies hold too much political power (Pew's 10,133-adult survey).
First-order effects
- Lawmakers pushing antitrust or platform-accountability bills gain polling cover from the demographic most likely to be swing voters for decades, with 51% of students explicitly endorsing more regulation.
- Social media platforms face a legitimacy problem among their core future user base — 77% of college students already see them as holding too much power, before those users' careers and voting patterns fully form.
Second-order effects
- Platform lobbying and trust-and-safety spending shifts from persuasion to damage control, since the WSJ's finding that 84% of voters are 'very nervous' about social media's impact on kids gives child-safety legislation a rare cross-partisan coalition.
- Competitors and smaller platforms can market themselves against incumbents' reputational deficit, turning 'less powerful' into a selling point as public sentiment hardens.
Third-order effects
- If the trajectory holds — 40% pro-regulation in late 2017 to supermajority concern by 2024 — platform power becomes a standing regulatory target rather than a partisan flashpoint, forcing governance questions into every Congress regardless of which party controls it.
- The consistency across student, voter, and adult samples suggests the sentiment is generational and durable, meaning today's platforms will operate under permanently higher scrutiny than the environment they were built in.
The trend: American public opinion is consolidating behind the view that social media power requires government restraint, moving regulation from fringe proposal to baseline expectation across age groups.