Registered voters want the feds to regulate tech, survey finds

New data from Morning Consult indicates that a majority of voters view regulating the tech sector as a job for the federal government.

According to a survey conducted in mid-March, 64% of Democrats and 54% of independents said passing legislation to regulate tech industries is a federal issue, while 52% of Republicans saw it as a state-level responsibility.

While state efforts to regulate tech—particularly efforts focused on online privacy—have bipartisan support, awareness about such actions is low: The survey found 61% of voters said they hadn’t heard about Maryland’s digital ad tax, for example, (which was passed by the state in 2021, then ruled unconstitutional, with an appeal now pending before the state’s Supreme Court).

Respondents to the survey were most aware of state tech regulations attempting to limit content moderation on social media platforms.

The youth factor: Parsing the data by generation reveals that Gen Z voters, when compared to their older counterparts, were less likely to support stricter content moderation, and more likely to think that technology more broadly is sufficiently regulated.

Younger voters are also paying close attention to efforts to ban social media apps. In a separate study at the end of last year, Morning Consult found that 57% of Gen Z respondents had heard at least something about Montana’s efforts to ban TikTok, while nearly three-quarters were aware of federal efforts to do so.

Gen Z’s hesitancy around regulation may go beyond their love of TikTok to their lack of experience with society-changing tech, AJ Dellinger, the Morning Consult tech data reporter who authored the report, told Tech Brew in an email via spokesperson Anna Rose Pardue.

“Their view of regulating the industry…is not really shaped by the same fights that might define regulation for other generations,” he added. “They have grown up with a version of the internet that has largely been the same. There hasn’t been the kind of upheaval that previous generations have experienced—going from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0.”

Younger voters’ love of TikTok aside, the new data reinforces what tech companies likely already know: There’s consumer appetite for a tech crackdown.