Consumers have their fingers attached to the phones 24/7. It’s an addiction that begins with the desire to scroll just a few friends and ends up scrolling the feeds for hours.
According to Hawley the core purpose of this Act is to ban the infinite scroll of social media feed, an automatic play of videos and other addictive features that makes users attached to their phone all day long.
According to this new bill, social media companies need to make an accept/decline option for some specific features and enable people to monitor the time they spend on these social media platforms.
After the bill is passed it will require at least 6 months for the social media companies to implement features to enable users to set time limits on the usage of platforms each day. The default time limit will be 30 minutes and it can be increased manually according to the users’ requirements but it will automatically reset to the default time limit on the first day of every month.
In the bill, there is also a demand for a pop-up feature to appear on the screen of users every 30 minutes to inform them about the total time duration of their usage.
Similar to that social media platform like Instagram and Facebook also lets users monitor their activities and the time they spend on each platform every day.
This new bill would also help ban in-app rewards or badges that promote access usage of social media platforms.
Photo: Getty Images
Read next: 6 ways to protect your mental health from social media’s dangers
A new bill by Hawley
People need to get a life outside the social media platforms and for that purpose, Josh Hawley is proposing a bill that would prohibit online platforms to stop using features intended to get people hooked on their smartphones.According to Hawley the core purpose of this Act is to ban the infinite scroll of social media feed, an automatic play of videos and other addictive features that makes users attached to their phone all day long.
According to this new bill, social media companies need to make an accept/decline option for some specific features and enable people to monitor the time they spend on these social media platforms.
After the bill is passed it will require at least 6 months for the social media companies to implement features to enable users to set time limits on the usage of platforms each day. The default time limit will be 30 minutes and it can be increased manually according to the users’ requirements but it will automatically reset to the default time limit on the first day of every month.
In the bill, there is also a demand for a pop-up feature to appear on the screen of users every 30 minutes to inform them about the total time duration of their usage.
Screen Time by other companies
Any innovation is helpful until it becomes an addiction. The feature of monitoring mobile activities is already implemented by Apple and Google named Screen Time and Digital Wellbeing.- Also read: 2019 Social media demographics
Similar to that social media platform like Instagram and Facebook also lets users monitor their activities and the time they spend on each platform every day.
Implementations after this new bill
Within the three months after passing the bill, social media companies would much likely implement features to ban automatically load and display of content other than the one user clicks to play. If someone scrolls at the bottom of their feed they would have to especially press a specific button or icon to load additional content.This new bill would also help ban in-app rewards or badges that promote access usage of social media platforms.
Conclusion:
Addiction to social media platforms is a disease that can only be prevented with this new bill. It is unclear which part of the bill will be implemented but it is a very good step towards making social media platforms less addictive for users.
Photo: Getty Images
Read next: 6 ways to protect your mental health from social media’s dangers
