Sen. Josh Hawley advanced his authoritarian adventure on Tuesday by introducing his Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology Act.
Hawley says the act will prevent harmful use of social media. But this isn’t about protecting individuals, it’s about increasing government control over our daily lives and dynamic businesses. It deserves our common outrage.
Even for Hawley, the authoritarianism here is quite stunning.
For a start, the bill would require Facebook, Twitter, and cellphone app manufacturers to introduce software which “automatically limits the amount of time that a user may spend on those platforms across all devices to 30 minutes a day unless the user elects to adjust or remove the time limit and, if the user elects to increase or remove the time limit, resets the time limit to 30 minutes a day on the first day of every month.”
How is that something the government needs to be involved with? Hawley wants government-enforced automatic time limits on how we spend our time using lawful products.
Sure, he gives us a choice as to whether to remove the automatic government-mandated limits, but only because he must by the force of the First Amendment. But this is true authoritarianism, and it gets worse.
Hawley’s bill would also ban Facebook’s infinite scroll (which allows users to keep scrolling down their news feed in perpetuity), it would ban YouTube’s autoplay mode (which automatically plays another video based on what you’ve just watched, and can easily be turned off), and it would heavily restrict companies from offering awards to users based on their interaction with the platform.
Again, this is about mandating control over individual lives.
To be fair to Hawley, he is at least willing to publicize his overriding intent here. He’s not trying to reform big technology companies, he wants to kill them off entirely.
In an op-ed published in May, Hawley’s motives were transparent: “Maybe we’d be better off if Facebook disappeared.” Now he’s got the legislation to make that happen.
Hawley lamented in the same op-ed that social media employees don’t work in an industry of his choosing, asking “What marvels might these bright minds have produced had they been oriented toward the common good?” But don’t worry, Marshal Hawley is coming to the rescue: “we must” ensure, he says, that these people are forced into different work.
Hawley wants to control what you do with your free time and how you earn your living, all because he thinks he knows better than hundreds of millions of individuals making billions of individual choices each day.
Like his sad effort to eliminate Section 230, Hawley’s latest authoritarianism deserves legislative annihilation.
