[micromacrofoot]

> Most people aren't addicted to anything let alone social media

Even if it's just 5-10% (difficult to prove one way or the other, but some have estimated it's within this range) that's a massive amount of people on a global scale. That's enough to influence elections, for example. Scrutiny seems reasonable.

[thebean11]

Sure let's say it's 10%, is the conclusion you draw from that that free will doesn't exist? Do 100% of people need to give up the freedom of choice to lower that figure?

Not sure what you're getting at about elections, are you saying that's a reason to intervene? I don't really want the government making policy for the purpose of influencing election outcomes.

[oblio]

So dramatic.

100% of people will need to give up some luxuries so that everyone can benefit, and especially <<vulnerable groups>> can benefit.

Taxes work the same way. Laws in general work the same way (otherwise we'd assume everyone is smart, fair and calculated heck, perfect, all the time).

[thebean11]

Can you be more specific then about what we're discussing, if it's not "ban things that the 10% is addicted to"?

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

They aren't talking about bans, but other controls. Cigarettes are not banned outright, but cigarette companies are banned from advertising in a lot of mediums and cigarette cartons have a warning label about the harmful effects of smoking them. For a long time there were PSAs about how bad they were for you too, to counteract the damage already done by the tobacco industry's marketing. And we tax them pretty harshly. People still smoke, it is still legal to smoke. We could do similar things for food and social media without outright banning it.

[thebean11]

Yeah that's fair. Like I alluded to in a sibling comment thread, though, I think doing the same thing for food is pretty dangerous given our still pretty limited understanding of what foods are actually bad for you. Eggs are still oscillating between healthy and unhealthy every few years (although I think we're settling on healthy? Who knows!). Cigarettes aren't needed to sustain life so there's not as much risk to meddling like that.

The only thing I can really get behind is stricter controls on individual ingredients that are very clearly unhealthy and obviously don't need to be part of your diet (BPAs, trans fats, etc). Once you start messing with society's macros though it's fraught territory and very easy to do harm IMO.