GOP Sen. Josh Hawley wants to outlaw Snapchat streaks

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) is coming for Gen Z.

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. That argument is similar to what critics said about the introduction of the cell phone itself, as well as dozens of other apparently mindless technologies and hobbies over the years.

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Hawley isn't going so far as to call for a ban on social media in its entirety, though he suggested we all step off of it in a May op-ed for USA Today. Also in May, Hawley proposed banning "abusive" loot boxes from video games, which let players purchase access to advantages within games.