Ought There Be a Law?

A few weeks ago, I suggested that Missouri Senator Josh Hawley was coloring outside the lines with his USA Today op-ed complaining about the deliberately addictive nature of social media. I had no idea how far outside the lines Sen. Hawley wanted to go; as he has now introduced the Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology (SMART) Act to force social media companies to act the way he thinks is best.

It's tempting to just mock the senator for his bill's stupid acronym name, but if we did that every time some lawmaker wants to make a splash with something he or she knows won't happen then we would have time for nothing else. Sen. Hawley wants to make social media companies get rid of continuous scrolling and other features that keep and hold people's attention. He wants those companies to have a default setting on their home pages that boots users after 30 minutes unless they set their own time limits, and renew those settings every month. And even if people do set longer times, the social media platforms will be required to have a pop-up every thirty minutes telling them how long they've been on the site.

Another thing that would be a no-no would be autoplay videos or audio except on sites specifically designed to stream playlist content like Spotify. Or ones like this.

Yes, Sen. Hawley's own homepage has an autoplay video. I have no doubt he has a perfectly rational explanation for why his proposed SMART Act wouldn't apply to his own website, but I don't really care. If you can't suss out how it's going to look to have an autoplay video on your own page while you stump for your stupid bill that wants to get rid of autoplay videos, then you ought to think -- if that option's available -- twice about using the word SMART in your proposal.

Sen. Hawley's bill is designed to fight something that he says is designed to be addictive. Well, those always work. Again, there can be all kinds of responses to his claim that social media addiction is bad for people and thus, bad for the country they make up. Agree, disagree, tell him to get off your lawn, whatever. But even if it's a good claim, it's bad law. Sen. Hawley is OK with putting people in jail if they let you look at Facebook for 31 minutes without you telling Facebook that's what you want to do and Facebook telling you that you've been looking at it for 31 minutes. Who goes to jail here? Company CEO's? Coders? Shareholders who own stock in the company?

The immediate impact of this bill if it became law would be a hundred thousand coders writing workarounds for the popups and time limits. Would they be subject to arrest for doing so? Or if the companies added, say, a premium level of service in which you paid a nominal fee to ignore everything Sen. Hawley wants to tell you to do -- what then? All the senator will have done is made the companies richer while not solving the problem he says he wants to solve. Or maybe we could have new laws that didn't let them do that, because we don't have nearly enough laws already.

Maybe I'm just being grouchy, but I have a problem understanding why someone can look at the federal government and say, "Those are the people we need to tell social media companies what to do." There are municipal governments willing to put a 79-year-old woman in jail for feeding stray cats that come on her porch. Why in the world would we want even bigger and dumber levels of government to try to control and direct something as fluid as social media?

Or perhaps Sen. Hawley is actually thinking of job security. As many senators before him have shown, advocacy for dirt-dumb ideas is a sure way to make sure that one's own party will be happy to have you stay in the Senate rather than try for bigger jobs where you could do even more damage.