61% of Americans favour stronger social media oversight, poll finds

Americans do not agree on much these days, yet a clear majority now wants the government to keep a closer eye on social media. According to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, 61% favour stronger oversight of the companies behind the feeds, a striking figure in a country where regulation is usually a partisan flashpoint.

What makes the result unusual is how little the parties diverge on it. Support runs to 71% among Democrats and 62% among Republicans, so while the enthusiasm is not identical, the appetite for tougher rules stretches comfortably across the aisle rather than splitting along it.

The consensus grows even firmer once children enter the picture. Two-thirds of respondents, 66% in all, back laws requiring age-verification tools to keep under-16s off the platforms, and here it is Republicans who lead at 74%, with Democrats close behind on 69%.

That worry about young users rests on a widely shared belief about harm. A remarkable 85% think social media can be addictive for children, and similar majorities say it damages their mental health, a verdict that helps explain why age checks command such broad support.

The public’s feelings about their own use are far more tangled, though. Seven in ten say the time they spend on the platforms is fun, even as 35% report feeling stressed by it and 52% admit they spend too much time scrolling each day, a set of answers that captures the love-hate relationship many have with their phones.

The numbers themselves carry weight because the sample is large. Ipsos surveyed 4,505 US adults online over six days ending on 3 August, giving the poll a margin of error of about two percentage points and making its headline findings hard to dismiss as noise.

The timing matters, too, since the political ground has already begun to shift. Lawmakers have grown far more willing to act, and the US House has passed a kids’ online-safety package that set up a fight in the Senate, exactly the kind of measure this poll suggests voters would welcome.

Age verification, the idea with the broadest backing, is also the one gaining the most momentum abroad. Greece is preparing to bar under-15s from social media from 2027, part of a wider European move to treat childhood and infinite scrolling as a poor mix.

Britain has been weighing something similar, having debated an under-16 social media ban, and the direction of travel on both sides of the Atlantic is unmistakably toward keeping the youngest users out altogether.

Enforcement, however, is where these ambitions tend to stumble. Australia’s own teen ban tripped at the first age check, with testers finding the verification tools easy to fool, a reminder that popular policies are only as good as the technology meant to deliver them.

The findings also sit awkwardly beside how people actually behave. Most respondents still describe their time on the platforms as fun even as they call for tighter rules, which suggests the demand for oversight is less about hating social media than about wanting protection from its worst effects, particularly for children.

That distinction matters for how any regulation is framed, because voters seem to be asking for guardrails rather than bans for adults, while reserving their toughest instincts for the youngest users. It is a nuance lawmakers will have to navigate carefully if they want rules that match the public mood rather than overshoot it.

For the platforms, the poll is an uncomfortable signal even so. When six in ten Americans want tougher oversight and two-thirds want children walled off, the political cost of resisting new rules keeps climbing, and the companies’ usual argument that regulation is divisive looks weaker when the numbers cross party lines.

None of this guarantees legislation, of course, because Washington has a long habit of debating social media without acting on it. But rare bipartisan agreement, backed by hard numbers, is precisely the sort of thing that turns a perennial talking point into a law.