Incoming communications minister Malcolm Turnbull is facing a social media backlash after he seemingly brushed aside a snowballing online campaign to save Labor's national broadband network (NBN).

An internet petition set up by a Liberal-voting student six days ago had more than 200,000 online signatures by 4pm (AEST) on Thursday, making it the largest ever online petition in Australia.

The NBN petition on Change.org calls on the incoming coalition government to scrap plans to create a fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) network in place of Labor's existing fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) approach.

When asked on Twitter to reconsider policy in light of the petition, Mr Turnbull replied: "Wasn't there an election recently at which nbn policy was a key issue?"

Mr Turnbull's stirred a hornet's nest of response, with hundreds of people flooding his Facebook page with comments and thousands appealing to him through Twitter.