Senator tries to slice ‘addictive’ features from social media

WASHINGTON — The youngest senator in Congress, and one of its toughest crusaders against Big Tech, proposed a bill Tuesday meant to curb social media addiction by regulating the techniques that prolong engagement on the platforms.

Freshman Sen. Josh Hawley’s bill, the Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology Act, would make it illegal for social media companies such as Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat to use infinite scroll, autoplay video or techniques like Snapchat’s “streaks,” which reward a user with badges for repeated use.

“Big tech has embraced a business model of addiction,” Hawley, a Missouri Republican, said in a statement announcing the bill. “Too much of the ‘innovation’ in this space is designed not to create better products, but to capture more attention by using psychological tricks that make it difficult to look away. This legislation will put an end to that and encourage true innovation by tech companies.”

The senator has spent his first year in office taking on Big Tech. He grilled Google executives during hearings on the company’s data-collection policies. He wrote a scathing letter to the Federal Trade Commission, rebuking regulators for failing to protect consumers from privacy abuse and overreach by Silicon Valley. He proposed a bipartisan update to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which would further curb tech companies’ ability to monitor the online behavior of kids.

At 39, he is a digital native with a deeper understanding of tech than many of his colleagues. Others in the new class to conquer Capitol Hill have used the very social media platforms he rails against to elevate their voices and steer the online conversation. But Hawley has said he chooses to use them sparingly and has even suggested that society would be better off if social media disappeared.

He has called social media a “parasite on productive investment, on meaningful relationships, on a healthy society,” and he once asked during an NBC interview, “should these platforms exist at all?”

The bill proposes regulatory measures that would force users to actively choose to engage for prolonged periods rather than being mindlessly sucked into the void.

It would require platforms to implement “natural stopping points,” or places where a video or post stops and the users are prompted to click or select another piece of content.

Hawley’s proposal would also require social media companies to create a “user-friendly interface” that would allow users to set time limits or boundaries for themselves and actively display how much time they had spent on any platform.

In addition, the bill would require the FTC to produce a report at least every three years on the “issue of Internet addiction” that would explore the ways “social media companies ... interfere with free choices of individuals on the Internet.”

The Internet Association said in a statement from President and CEO Michael Beckerman that social media platforms already invest and participate in programs and partnerships that “promote healthy online experiences.”

“Funding for independent scientific research is critical to better understand the impact of screen time and identify more ways to enhance people’s well-being on and offline,” Beckerman’s statement said.