“We should have a discussion about the business model of the social media platforms as they have evolved as an ad-supported business model that is pushing addiction and rewarding addiction,” Hawley said.

“If we broke Facebook up into 50 Facebooks who all pursued the same business model, would our lives, our economy, our society be measurably improved?” he continued. “I don’t know that they would.”…

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube “hold themselves out to their users as being free, but they’re not free and they’re not free at all,” Hawley said. “I mean they depend on collecting personal, private, confidential information from their users without consent, on monetizing it without permission and then trying to get their users, frankly, addicted to their platforms so they can assure a sufficient base of customers to sell their ads.”