Tech Panic: Why We Shouldn't Fear Facebook and the Future by Robby Soave

Author:Robby Soave [Soave, Robby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Technology Studies, political science, Public Policy, Science & Technology Policy, Business & Economics, Industries, Computers & Information Technology
ISBN: 9781982159610
Google: Bt4YEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2021-09-28T23:19:28.004953+00:00

UNFRIENDED

It’s possible to be concerned about screen addiction without being paranoid about it. Indeed, it’s wise. Yet the proposed legislative remedies significantly overstate the dangers while offering unworkable and possibly unconstitutional solutions.

Take the Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology (SMART) Act, which was introduced by—surprise!—Senator Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) in July 2019. The bill would prohibit social media companies from utilizing several features, including infinite scroll. Infinite scroll, in use on Twitter and Facebook, means that more content is always loaded as a user browses; there’s no need to hit the refresh button, or click to an additional page. (The inventor of this feature, Aza Raskin, deeply regrets it—he is one of the tech skeptics interviewed in The Social Dilemma.)11 Hawley’s bill would also make it illegal for social media platforms to automatically play music and videos—like when an embedded YouTube video begins playing on Twitter as soon as the user encounters it—which is another common, modern feature. (This wouldn’t apply to advertisements, though.) “Streak” badges—which are awarded by Snapchat to users who send messages to each other on consecutive days—would also face the axe under Hawley’s bill.

The legislation goes even further: Social media companies would be required to create a feature that automatically kicks users out of the platform every thirty minutes. This would be the new default, and though users would be allowed to manually disable it, they would have to do so again every month.

“The business model for many internet companies, especially social media companies, is to capture as much of their users’ attention as possible,” the bill reads. “To achieve this end, some of these internet companies design their platforms and services to exploit brain physiology and human psychology. By exploiting psychological and physiological vulnerabilities, these design choices interfere with the free choices of users.”

That’s one way of looking at the matter, though one could make an equally if not more compelling case that it is this very legislation that interferes with the free choice of users by telling them which features they are permitted to use. Indeed, this is the general problem with Hawley’s approach to tech issues, which presumes that the government should be the final decision maker rather than private companies and their customers. The Federal Trade Commission, a vast government bureaucracy, would be charged with ensuring compliance with the SMART Act, and the Department of Health and Human Services would be empowered to propose new rules to prevent the exploitation of “human psychology or brain physiology.” That’s a fairly broad mandate—what precisely constitutes exploitation of human psychology?—and one that could give the government vast new powers to restrict social media companies in undesirable ways.

Recall that this legislation has been proposed despite the lack of any real solid scientific evidence suggesting a link between social media and psychological problems. “The literature is a wreck,” Anthony Wagner, chair of the psychology department at Stanford University, told Vox’s Brian Resnick. “Is there anything that tells us there’s a causal link? That our media use behavior is actually

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