One-Third Right but all Wrong

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley ran an opinion piece in USA Today about what he thinks needs to happen to social media. In a time when more than a few legislators want to see companies like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram broken up because they're too big and supposedly too powerful, the freshman Republican goes several steps more: He wants to see them all die and wither away.

Social media, Sen. Hawley says, have come to function in people's lives like addictive drugs. And that's not a byproduct or a bug but a feature of their business model. They make money by selling advertising, and the way they guarantee advertisers that there will be people who watch the ads is by creating an experience designed to be addictive and time-wasting. We would all, Sen. Hawley says, be better off without them.

When it comes to Twitter I won't argue with Sen. Hawley one bit. Being useless would be a step up for the microblogging platform, which encourages rash, poorly reasoned and unconsidered responses to events or comments. Instagram I've got no opinion about because I've never messed with it. I personally find Facebook a useful communications and publicity platform that lets me put out a lot of content for next to no cost and get it in front of most of the eyeballs I want to see it.

But...

Telling me that social media is bad for me may or may not be true. It may or may not be something I need to hear. But it is with certainty not Senator Hawley's place to tell me about it. The senator graduated with honors from Stanford with a degree in history. His law degree is from Yale. He's clerked for United States Supreme Court Justice John Roberts. He's the reason we don't have to listen to Claire McCaskill anymore. Those are all good things, but none of them suggest any special knowledge about the human psyche or how social media affects it. Meaning the only reason he's putting this opinion forward for consideration is because he's a United States Senator, and social commentary and engineering is not a Senator's job.

You can word-search the Constitution's Article 1, both inside and outside the Senate's specific section 3, and you won't find "parent" anywhere therein. Former Pennsylvania representative Rick Santorum had this problem back when he wanted to be President. He wanted to talk about the problems that sexual libertinism had created in the country in the years since we went meshuggah sometime in the 1960s, even though the job he wanted us to give him has nothing to do with that sort of thing.

Sen. Hawley is doing the same thing. If I knew him personally his opinion on the problems caused by social media might interest me. If he were using that opinion as a means of describing some sort of overall worldview to draw a contrast between him and an opponent it could be useful. But I don't and he's not and there's nothing in his background that makes his two pennies matter more than anyone else's.

If he was in the House I could say, "Representative, shut up and represent," but, "Shut up and Senate" doesn't make much sense. So I'll go with "Pipe down and legislate," although I'm under no illusions such instructions would ever gain Sen. Hawley's attention or be followed if so.