What's very obviously unnecessary is the need for a law to police this. You can just not use things you don't like. This need to project one's own morality upon others will be the source of endless conflict.
What are your thoughts on introducing a law that requires social media sites with infinite scroll to feature an addiction warning, something like: "Using this platform may cause addiction in some users."?
There's good reason for a lot of the inaction around asbestos. If it's not moving, not being touched and not accessible to kids / pets etc then it's fine to leave alone. The alternative being extremely costly remediation, and there are still millions of structures with asbestos in them.
... Prop 65 is dumb though. Kind of a trend in California law.
This isn't useful advice for addictive things that have high short term reward and high long term regret though. Especially so when the other party has a strong incentive to keep you trapped in that loop of regret.
Exactly. Also, for responders, let's skip past the "if addicts didn't want to use them they wouldn't," and go straight to framing it as a moral failing implying that they deserve it.
I don't consider addiction a moral failing. But I do think it's wrong to place all the blame on social media if you also play an active role in sustaining your addiction.
That statement leans very hard on the word “like”. Do addicts “like” their addictive behaviors? In a way it doesn’t matter, they’re going to keep doing it anyway.
Conversely it isn't very cool seeing the person who grew up as a McLaren fan dying prematurely due to being influenced to start a deadly habit from a young age. And I say this as someone who enjoys smoking.
What is the cost-benefit analysis that led you to that conclusion? I ask as someone who enjoys smoking but struggles to see any good argument for the return of tobacco advertising.
The law being discussed is for minors. As a society we don't think minors have sufficient executive function to make those decisions, so we find it acceptable to ban them in those context.
Alternatively: As a society we don't think ALL minors have sufficient executive function to make those decisions, so we let parents who do make that decision.
This societal view that you are a powerless NPC slave to ones desires/addictions is highly toxic. It is not in fact binary for most people and people do have free will to make different choices. To absolve the individual of accountability is to undermine the very fabric of society. The way individuals typically overcome addiction is through reliance on close family & friends. Those family & friends can "take the phone away" or "uninstall the app" if there is really an issue. Laws are a blunt instrument and should be used sparingly.
I’m a Buddhist, so I really do see what you’re saying about personal responsibility and agency, but the other problem I see is that the companies at the forefront of these ultra-addictive industries (including mass social media) get busted eventually every single time for working overtime to hide what they knew about how damaging their products can be, and in fact to convince the public that their products do the opposite of what they actually do.
Does nicotine have some beneficial health effects? Yeah, it actually does. But do they outweigh the downsides (and societal costs)? Absolutely not.
I do believe strongly in individual freedom of choice, but only under a paradigm of informed consent, and companies like Meta have never allowed that to happen and they never will, because the truth getting out could destroy their bottom line.
> Does nicotine have some beneficial health effects? Yeah, it actually does. But do they outweigh the downsides (and societal costs)? Absolutely not.
What are the downsides and societal costs of social media addiction? We have decades of strong evidence on the harms of nicotine and cigarettes, but the evidence regarding social media addiction is nowhere near as clear-cut, at least from what I've read. Likewise, the causal relationship between cigarettes and their harms is well established, whereas the relationship between social media use and addiction-related harms is much harder to disentangle from other contributing factors.
Not to mention, nicotine is highly addictive for almost any user, while most people who use social media do not become addicted.
I understand the broader point you're making. I'm just not convinced there's enough evidence to justify treating social media addiction as comparable to cigarette addiction.
That article gives a superficial overview of some of the research, which for obvious reasons is still in its infancy.
I didn’t mean to compare the harms to tobacco, but to how these companies tend to operate.
That said, the fallout of social media addiction and overuse is far weirder than the fallout from tobacco (which mostly just gives people cancer). Social media appears to be tearing the fabric of society apart.
I don’t have studies to cite but it seems like half of americans are one type of conspiracy theorist or another now, and that’s directly attributable to these new media channels.
I think the negative effects have been most pronounced on young women (body image issues and bulemia) and people with low media literacy (the misinformation plague).
There’s also the algorithmic “extremism” pipeline, where anything you show a little interest in gets turned into more and more extreme iterations to keep you engaged.
So maybe “addiction” isn’t even the right word to use here. But just look around outside in any major city or event in America and see how compulsively almost everyone uses their phones during downtime. It’s reflexive at this point, not really a conscious decision.
Some of the scariest stuff is coming from primary school teachers. Most of them act like late gen z and gen alpha are genuinely illiterate. It makes sense, you have little kids trying to swipe on physical photos in picture frames and stuff. That says something big about their lifestyles and then imagine the downstream effects of that…
I think it really tells you something when the CEOs and people who work for social media companies don’t let their own kids use the product, or drastically limit access to it.
This is sparingly. The government basically let the tech industry run amok for 20 years and only acted when the problems it was causing were serious and undeniable.