There’s nothing smart about the SMART Act
It’s not clear that the latest antitech bill in Washington was ever written to pass. But the new legislation, put forward by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, is an alarming marker of a dangerous and shortsighted trend in policy. It should be opposed.
The Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology Act, as it is called, conveniently abbreviated as the SMART Act, would insert what is in effect one man’s amateur definition of “addiction” into both federal law and virtually all of our everyday lives. And it would apply an arbitrary, ineffective and unprincipled fix to the supposed problem.
There’s little question that some people — it is hard to measure how many — spend “too much” time on the internet. Many healthy Americans, for instance, conduct their business entirely online, or remain online for the entire business day. And there’s no denying that, because just about everything is on the internet, there’s no shortage of content that people are worse off after consuming in too great an amount.
Yet the SMART Act would paint all of social media with the brush of “addictive” technology. The theory is that the big tech companies designed their products to work our brain “chemistry” like an attention-harvesting machine, sucking us in and converting our engagement into big money.
Hawley sees big tech as an oligarchy with too much power, and wants to reduce its impact on our lives by hook or by crook. Silicon Valley may indeed be overbearing and even sometimes exploitative. His approach, however, badly misses the mark.
SMART would prohibit indefinite playlists that automatically put new content in front of the user, from YouTube’s autoplay algorithms to Twitter’s endless scroll. Even more outlandishly, it would ban all Americans from even using any platform for more than a half an hour a day, unless they opted out of the constraint once a month.
This is economic, scientific and moralistic nonsense. Studies already suggest that the vast majority of Americans use social media platforms moderately or not at all. Just to take the example of Twitter: the overwhelming majority of tweets are sent by a small fraction of power users, while all users make up a minority of Americans.
Going down the SMART Act’s road invites an era of endless mischief and conflict as different interest groups vie to make the federal government clamp down on content they oppose and in effect promote content they like or make.
Perhaps one day science will conclusively prove true the allegation that social media is not just more engrossing than all previous forms of media but more harmful, too. Even if experts suddenly agreed beyond a shadow of a doubt, inefficient and easily worked-around prohibitions would not make America any healthier.
Busybody legislation is bad enough without being arbitrary, half-baked and suppressive of free thought and open communication. The SMART Act is conspicuously lacking in the intelligence needed to grasp that fact.
— Los Angeles Daily News,
MediaNews Group