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Josh Hawley Is From the Government and He’s Here to Help
Josh Hawley, like all ambitious men, is telling you who and what he is about. We should listen.
In the latest of a string of legislative proposals aimed at “Big Tech” Josh Hawley has proposed this nugget of nanny state numbskullery:
The first-term senator continued his crackdown on social media on Tuesday, introducing a bill that would ban infinite scroll, autoplay, and “awards linked to engagement” from social media platforms. That takes direct aim at every major social media site out there, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram’s neverending content streams and how Snapchat counts continuous streaks of messages between a pair of users.
As Hawley put it in a tweet introducing the bill, “big tech has embraced addiction as a business model” and its platforms are designed to “capture attention by using psychological tricks that make it impossible to look away.” So he’s proposing an all-out ban on autoplay and autofilled content, as well as a requirement that social media platforms allow users to set time limits on how long they can spend on the apps.
It’s not even an original argument. The same excuse for government intervention in the name of “addiction” has been applied to everything from video games to…
