Last month, the youngest U. S. Senator,
Josh Hawley, a freshman Republican from Missouri, filed a bill called the Social Media
Addiction Reduction Technology (SMART) Act.
The purpose of the act is to do something about the harmful effects of
addiction to social media.
What would the
bill do? I haven't read it, but according to media
reports it would change the ways companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google
deal with their customers. The open
secret of social media is that they are designed quite consciously and
intentionally to be habit-forming.
So-called "free" media make their money by selling
advertising, and advertising is worthless unless someone looks at it. So their bottom line depends on how firmly and
how long they glue your eyeballs to their sites. And they have scads of specialists—psychologists,
media experts, and software engineers—whose full-time job is to squeeze an
extra minute or two of attention from you every day, regardless of whatever
else is going on in your life.
Writing on the
website of the religion and public life journal First Things, Jon
Schweppe says the SMART Act may not be the one-stop cure-all for our social
media problems, but it's a step in the right direction. It would prohibit certain practices that are
currently commonplace, apparently including one that has always reminded me of what life
might be like in Hell: the infinite
webpage.
It used to be
that when people first figured out how to make a web page scroll, it was only
so long. You could always get to the
bottom of it, where you might find useful things like who wrote it or other
masthead-and-boilerplate information.
Well, that doesn't always happen anymore. The infinite webpage pits the pitiful finite
mortal human against the practically unlimited resources of the machine to come
up with more eye candy, as much as you want.
You keep scrolling, it will keep showing you new stuff.
This
particular feature reminds me of a passage from C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the
Witch, and the Wardrobe featuring the candy called Turkish Delight. The wicked-witch
Queen of Narnia offered the boy Edmund his favorite type of candy to convince
him to betray his friends. The candy she
offered him was enchanted so that whoever ate it always wanted more, and
"would even, if they were allowed, go on eating it till they killed
themselves." No matter how much
time you waste on an infinite website, there's always more.
The SMART bill would also
give users a realistic option to voluntarily limit their own use of social
media with daily timers, prohibits "badge" systems (which is
evidently a kind of special-privilege feature that gets rewards heavy users and
encourages them even more), and would prohibit or modify other addictive features.
The Federalist's John
Thomas sees the SMART bill as the first step in what may be a turning point in
the history of social media. He likens
it to the Parisian reaction to brightly-colored advertising posters enabled by
the then-new lithography process in the 1860s.
Pretty soon, a good percentage of all available vertical flat surfaces
were covered with posters, and the town fathers decided to regulate how and
where posters could be displayed.
This may be the point at
which the U. S. citizenry stops merely wringing its hands and saying there's
nothing you can do in the face of rising teen depression and other ill effects
of social media, and starts to take action.
As Thomas points out, though, there are few grass-roots organizations
taking up the control-social-media banner.
This may be because the
dangers social media pose for mental health are insidious and gradual rather
than abrupt and catastrophic. Suppose
that every person had an intrinsic social-media limit: say after viewing X hours of social media
(and X would be different for each person), your brain would literally explode
and you'd die. Well, you can bet that
after two or three of these incidents, governments would come down on Facebook,
Google, and company like a ton of bricks with all sorts of restrictions, up to
and including an outright ban.
But nobody's brain literally
explodes from doing too much Facebook. The negative consequences of
social-media use are much less obvious than that, but are nonetheless
real. Even the most tragic cases of teen
suicides that result from peer persecution over social media can be blamed not
just on the media, but on the cruelty of other teens. Nevertheless, the nominal anonymity and ease
of use that social media offer can turn what might be fairly well-behaved peers
in person into abominable monsters on Facebook.
Some writers oppose the
SMART Act and similar legislation on the free-market principle that government
is more likely to make things worse with legislation than otherwise. While that can happen, it is foolish to take the
hyper-libertarian position that if a good or service is bad, people just
shouldn't use it. Back when ordinary
glass was used for automobile windshields, it would turn into long razor-sharp
shards that decapitated numerous drivers, and Congress invited Henry Ford to
testify about a proposed law that would require the use of the more expensive
safety glass in windshields. Reportedly
(and this is from memory), Ford said, "I'm in the business of making cars,
I'm not in the business of saving lives."
When Mark Zuckerberg
testified before Congress not too long ago, he was self-controlled enough not
to say anything that harsh. But if the
day has at last arrived when our elected officials are finally going to do
something about the harmful effects of social media, one of two things (or
perhaps a combination) is going to happen.
Either the social-media companies will have to get ahead of the proposed
legislation and enact real, quantifiable reforms of their own and prove that
they work, or they will have to change their ways in accordance with regulatory
laws that they brought upon themselves.
My own hope is that the
companies will figure out a transparent and effective way to
self-regulate. But the choice is theirs,
and if they brush off the SMART Act and think they have the raw power to squash
such regulation, they may be in for a painful surprise.
Sources: Jon Schweppe's
article "Big Addiction" appeared on the First Things website
on Aug. 13, 2019 at https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/08/big-addiction. John Thomas's article "Hawley's SMART
Act Is the Beginning Of the Revolt Against Big Tech" is on the Federalist
website at https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/13/hawleys-smart-act-beginning-revolt-big-tech/.
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