Poll of 2,016 US voters: 80% say the government should do “everything it can” to curb tech giants; 84% are “very nervous” about impact of social media on kids
WSJ The privacy revolt of 2024 as I predicted in 2010 is right on schedule. In 2025 many will ask “how did you know such a major event would happen”. In 2010 I was called foolish. https://www.wsj.com/... Thomas Baekdal / @baekdal : Well, the study also found that the public overwhelmingly support tech. https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... Jesse Felder / @jessefelder : ‘80% of registered voters agreed the federal government “needs to do everything it can to curb the influence of big tech companies that have grown too powerful and now use our data to reach too far into our lives.”’ https://www.wsj.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This poll caps a five-year climb in anti-Big-Tech sentiment that the related coverage tracks closely: support for regulation rose from 40% to 55% between late 2017 and early 2018, then fears of insufficient regulation spiked another 15 points by November 2018. By early 2021, even college students were on board at 51% favoring more regulation — and this new survey pushes the number to 80%, near consensus.
What changed today is intensity, not direction: "everything it can" language and the 84% figure on kids signal emotional salience rather than abstract policy preference. The tension with the June Morning Consult finding — only 53% backing Congress' antitrust bills while 44% ranked tech regulation as their lowest priority — suggests broad anger without yet a mandate for specific bills.
First-order effects
- Congress faces widening pressure on the pending Big Tech antitrust bills: the public now supports aggressive action at 80%, well above the 53% support those specific bills drew just three months earlier.
- Platforms' child-safety practices become their most exposed flank, with 84% of registered voters "very nervous" about social media's effect on kids — a framing that puts Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok policy teams on defense.
Second-order effects
- Lawmakers can now cite near-consensus voter sentiment when advancing antitrust and child-safety measures, shifting the political cost of opposing such bills from risky to default.
- Tech companies' lobbying strategy pivots toward self-regulation offers — age limits, parental controls, data-use pledges — as the cheaper alternative to binding federal mandates they can no longer dismiss as fringe concern.
Third-order effects
- If the 2018-to-2021 trajectory holds, regulating Big Tech consolidates into a durable bipartisan position rather than a partisan issue, making the real fight over which instruments — antitrust suits, privacy law, child-safety rules — rather than whether to act.
- The persistent gap between generalized anger (80%) and support for specific legislation (53%) points to a structural risk: sustained public demand that outpaces congressional output keeps fueling executive-branch and state-level enforcement instead.
The trend: US voter appetite for curbing Big Tech has climbed steadily from minority view in 2018 to near-consensus by late 2021, with child safety emerging as its most potent driver.