What does Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley have against Silicon Valley? On July 31 he tweeted (as opposed to sending by Pony Express) “Social media ‘innovation’? What innovation? Big Tech doesn’t deliver for the American people, and that’s the biggest problem of all.” The previous day the senator introduced S.2314, the Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology Act, which would smother with a giant pillow the innovation he claims not to see. Be warned: Regulation may soon arrive in Techland.

Who is this guy—and why does he think he can micromanage a trillion-dollar industry? Born in Arkansas and bred in the Show Me State, Mr. Hawley graduated from Stanford, then Yale Law. He became Missouri’s attorney general in 2017 and began investigating the classified-ad website Backpage. The site sued to stop the investigation, lost, and then Mr. Hawley sued it back. He was thwarted in gathering information by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which I wrote about last month; the provision defines certain online services as platforms, not liable for the content their users post. The episode may have stoked Mr. Hawley’s disdain for social media and Big Tech. He also opened an antitrust investigation into Google the same year.

This antitech inclination hasn’t always defined Mr. Hawley’s persona. As attorney general he said, “American workers and American entrepreneurs can compete with anybody, anywhere if our government will stop making America a cost-prohibitive place to do business.” Hear, hear. When he won his Senate seat last year he ran mostly as a conventional conservative.

But even then he already had his enemies marked. His first Senate speech lamented the “cold and judgmental world of social media,” and things kind of went downhill from there. He even wrote a letter to Mark Zuckerberg more or less describing Facebook as one of the “forces parasitic on our national life.” Ouch.

Mr. Hawley’s new bill has all the worst instincts of the regulatory state—a disappointing achievement coming from a Republican. It would remove the autoplay feature from YouTube, end infinite scrolling on Twitter and Facebook feeds, limit scrolling time to three-minute sessions, set default limits on the use of platforms to 30 minutes a day, and outlaw Snapchat streaks (rewards for consecutive days of contact with friends) and most “gamification” (badges, rewards) for any online service. These diktats are the opposite of market freedom.