Hawley entered the Senate pledging to take on big tech. Has he succeeded?
A month before he took office, Sen. Josh Hawley appeared on Fox News and made a pledge: He was going to hold large tech companies accountable.
“These tech companies— Facebook, Google, Twitter— they have gotten huge. They have gotten powerful. They have gotten rich on the backs of this special immunity that they get from the federal government,” Hawley said at the time. “And I think it’s time we ask some hard questions.”
It’s an effort the Missouri Republican has made throughout his political career – from launching an investigation against Google while briefly serving as Missouri Attorney General to scolding tech executives in Senate committee rooms.
But as Hawley wraps up his first term in the Senate and is the favorite to win another six years in November’s general election against Democrat Lucas Kunce – his track record on tech legislation has featured more political attention than legislative action.
Hawley has introduced more than 20 bills aimed at the tech industry, not including the dozens of bills he joined as a co-sponsor or amendments he filed. Only one – legislation to ban TikTok from federal devices – passed the Senate, though failed in the House in both 2020 and 2022. The bill eventually became law in 2023 as part of a larger spending package that Hawley opposed.
“Congress is dysfunctional and that’s across all topics of which tech policy is just an example,” said Eric Goldman, a professor at the University of Santa Clara School of Law who focuses on internet law. “And as a result, very few things are getting through Congress, whether they’re needed or not.”
When asked about his record on the tech industry over the past few years, Hawley said he had made progress, particularly when it came to TikTok. But he placed any struggle to pass more significant legislation at the foot of Senate leadership, claiming the tech industry had too much power in Washington.
“I would say we made some progress,” Hawley said. “But is there a lot more to do? Yeah. A lot more to do.”
Legislative attempts
By the time Hawley had served in the Senate for seven months, he had already filed eight bills aimed at the tech industry.
The bills had a conservative populist edge to them. He wanted to prevent social media addiction by preventing endless scrolling on social media apps and auto-play features on YouTube. He wanted to keep tech companies from moderating political content on their sites. He wanted to prevent websites from showing ads that were based on data collected from a user.
While some of the legislation was praised by then-President Donald Trump, it floundered in the Republican-controlled Senate, where Hawley struggled to secure support from his colleagues.
Crafting tech policy is often difficult work. Lawmakers try to cobble together ideas in the hopes that it will overcome partisan rancor and still allow for growth in the American tech sector while providing guardrails against harms that have emerged from the internet.
In the past two years, Hawley has begun teaming up with Democrats on several pieces of tech legislation. He has co-sponsored artificial intelligence bills with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat; a bill to prevent the deceptive use of artificial intelligence in elections with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat; and an anti-child pornography bill with Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat.
Mark Jamison, a technology expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank in Washington, said it’s often difficult to find a policy solution in a subject area that is often evolving rapidly.
He used efforts to stop the spread of child pornography – Hawley has teamed up on legislation with Democrats on the issue – as an example of why it can be difficult to find a bipartisan policy solution.
“On the one hand, everybody wants to protect children. But on the other hand, how do you do that without requiring the tech companies to gather lots of data on children, which is what you want them to not do at the same time?” Jamison said. “So that contradiction makes it really hard to actually write laws that can make sense.”
Hawley often tries to take a simpler approach. His policy solutions focus on opening up social media and tech companies to more lawsuits – saying they would be more afraid of losing expensive legal battles than regulations in Washington.
Goldman, who studies internet law, said Hawley’s approach has earned him a reputation as someone who is just focused on building a national profile, not as someone attempting to craft meaningful tech legislation.
“I view Senator Hawley as a deeply unserious contributor to tech policy,” Goldman said. “He has almost never attempted to do anything that was clearly in his constituents’ best interests.”
Hawley has dismissed criticism of his legislation – arguing that the courts would have an easier time reining in tech companies than regulations, which he said could end up being determined by people who support the tech industry. Already, he accuses the tech industry of making it difficult for any of his legislation to pass.
“I mean, Durbin, Hawley, not the most common combination of senators,” Hawley said. “But our bill on CSAM (child sex abuse material), we can’t even vote on it on the floor. I mean, we can’t vote on it. This is an unbelievable indictment of this body and of the money that is behind the big tech companies.”
The attention economy
Hundreds of people who had been harmed by social media and their family members wearing bright yellow shirts packed into a Senate committee room in January as the CEOs of several tech companies testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
When it came Hawley’s time to speak, he focused on Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. Hawley had a request amid his excoriating line of questioning: he wanted Zuckerberg to stand up and apologize to the people and families who came to the hearing.
Zuckerberg did.
“One of the very effective tools of Congress is to have people come in and testify, and you can shine light on things,” Jamison said. “It may not be your best role to pass a law about something. But if you can trust people to think about it and draw public attention to it through the hearings, the speeches, etc, that can be very useful.”
In the absence of passing legislation, Hawley said he views attention to legislation or an issue as a key tool. He often attempts to force votes on his legislation amid the full Senate, even if he knows it will be blocked by another Senator.
“If that’s his goal, he has to be a credible contributor to the conversation,” Goldman said. “If he’s viewed as a clown, then actually, he’s not shaping the conversation at all. He’s just sidelined.”
For years, Hawley drew attention for his efforts to ban TikTok, a popular social media app.
The app is owned by ByteDance, a China-based company, which sparked national security concerns that the Chinese Communist Party could use it to collect information on Americans.
Hawley proposed several bills and amendments to ban the app – none of which were able to gather enough support to clear Congress.
But, over time, both Democrats and Republicans appeared to grow increasingly concerned about the app. By 2023, several lawmakers had proposed versions of restricting TikTok, from using the Department of Commerce to regulate its ownership to Hawley’s efforts to ban the app outright.
Those efforts came to a head in April, when the Congress passed a law that would force ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, to sell the app within nine months.
But the TikTok language was tacked onto a larger, more controversial package: A bill that would send billions in military aid to Ukraine, and Israel and to help shore up Taiwan’s defenses in the Pacific. Hawley, who is adamantly opposed to providing additional military aid to Ukraine, voted against the bill.
It was the second time Hawley voted against a TikTok ban. The first time, he voted against a version of his bill to ban TikTok from federal devices.
It, too, was tucked into a larger defense spending bill Hawley opposed.
