Nobody likes auto-playing video or sites that keep scrolling away infinitely when you’re just trying to reach the bottom of the page. But you probably don’t hate either “feature” as much as Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who introduced a bill today to ban these and other “exploitative” practices.
While the ban on infinite scroll is the most amusing part, the proposed SMART Act (PDF), a backronym for the Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology Act, seeks to ban online companies from using a wide array of tactics that “exploit human psychology or brain physiology” to reduce user choice.
The SMART Act is really trying to target dark patterns: interfaces deliberately designed to trick, confuse, or pull a user deeper into something than they otherwise would be. Those designs, Hawley argues, fuel social media addiction.
The business model for social media companies is to “capture as much of their users’ attention as possible,” the bill says, and the interfaces platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat use to exploit the human brain “interfere with the free choice of users.”
Infinite scroll and auto refill are on the no-no list because they eliminate “natural stopping points,” defined as a process that loads and displays more content into a feed than the typical user scrolls through in three minutes. Same goes for autoplaying media files, which the bill would ban except in the case of pre-made playlists or audio-only streaming on services such as Pandora or Spotify.