Today we face a crisis at the border, a $1 trillion deficit, and multiple school shootings just in the past year. But what does Josh Hawley, the freshman Republican senator from Missouri, choose to focus on?
Ending Snapchat streaks.
On Tuesday, Hawley introduced a bill to “curb social media addiction,” a problem that the supposed small government conservative apparently sees as important enough to warrant massive state intervention. His proposed legislation would regulate social media’s “addictive” qualities, which means no more Snapchat streaks, no more infinite scrolling down Twitter and Facebook, no more YouTube autoplay, and so on.
Clearly, Hawley isn’t addressing the problems that matter.
Hawley’s bill would make it illegal for social media companies to create what he calls a “business model of addiction” — also known as a product so good people want to keep using it. Social media use is a personal choice, and regulating Big Tech is a ludicrous example of big government controlling things they have no business getting involved in.
And suggesting that “addictive” features such as being able to scroll as long as you’d like or starting a “streak” with your friends on Snapchat creates a culture of addiction is absurd. Worse, forcing companies to end features users enjoy in favor of things like timers showing how long you’ve been on a website is foolish and paternalistic. If consumers want to regulate how much time we spend on social media, it’s not hard to look up at the clock.
Still, it’s no secret that Hawley isn’t a fan of social media.
In a USA Today op-ed, the senator questioned whether social media really was valuable at all, and suggested we would be “better off if Facebook disappeared.” Even if we generously assume that’s true, it doesn’t matter, it isn’t the government’s job to decide that for us or regulate things like social media. It’s up to the users themselves to determine if they would like to use social media, and how much time they spend on the platforms.
And Hawley’s assumption that social media use is something to be “fixed” is, in and of itself, flawed.
Hawley has a point that social media “capture[s] far more of our attention than [it] used to.” But this isn’t objectively a bad thing, and if Hawley is so against social media, he can make the same choice that thousands of others make to not use these services. Yet others see value in them, and it’s easy to see why.
Sure, social media has impacted the way we interact with each other in society. We could even go so far as to say it’s changed society as a whole — we communicate via text, get news from Twitter and Facebook, and have opportunities to meet new people and stay in touch with loved ones like never before.
And take the success of GoFundMe, a platform that is used to raise money for those in need. GoFundMe campaigns are often shared on Twitter and Facebook, and have raised over $5 billion for people in need.
The bottom line is that while it may be true that social media is changing how we interact as a society, change isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We are more connected than ever before: journalists can share articles far and wide, people can get instant news updates, and loved ones can talk to each other from halfway across the world. Even if there are harms, we all voluntarily choose to engage, or not engage, in social media use.
Josh Hawley needs to realize that the government has much bigger problems to solve.
Jordan Lancaster is a contributor to Red Alert Politics and a senior at Wake Forest University. She’s a Young Voices contributor and can be found on Twitter @jordylancaster.
