Can You Sue For Social Media Addiction?
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A landmark lawsuit in California is claiming that social media giants like Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat are intentionally designing their platforms to be addictive, causing severe mental health issues in minors. But is this really about protecting children, or is it a backdoor to destroy the free and open web? Experts say this lawsuit would set a dangerous legal precedent that gives the government sweeping authority to regulate, censor, and control online content.
As Mike Masnick writes in TechDirt:
To be clear: most social media companies absolutely design their products with increasing engagement in mind. There are plenty of corporate incentives to keep you using the app longer. And some people genuinely do use social media in ways that harm their lives. Both things can be true while “addiction” remains the wrong frame. The question is whether calling it an addiction actually helps anyone, or whether it just makes people feel powerless.
But there’s a meaningful difference between “this product is designed to form habits” and “this product is chemically addictive like heroin.” A chemical addiction involves tolerance, withdrawal, and physiological dependence. The study found that only about 4% of users reported experiencing anything akin to withdrawal symptoms (restlessness or trouble when prohibited from using) often or very often. The most common “symptom” was simply thinking about Instagram a lot—which probably describes anyone who uses any service frequently.
I think about Techdirt a lot. Am I “addicted” to it?
The addiction framing removes human agency from the equation. It treats users as helpless victims who can’t possibly resist the siren song of the infinite scroll. But the same study that found 2% of users at risk for addiction also found that 50% of frequent users recognized they had habits around Instagram use. Those users aren’t powerless. They can change their environment, their cues, their routines. But first they have to believe that’s possible—and the addiction narrative tells them it isn’t.
It also makes the technology appear inherently harmful, when (as pretty much every study keeps showing) only a very small percentage of people seem to have truly negative experiences with it. That should be cause to create targeted solutions for those who are genuinely struggling, not to declare an entire category of technology dangerous for everyone.
So here we are: lawsuits claiming to protect users from social media’s harms may themselves be contributing to those harms by amplifying the addiction narrative. The lawyers will get paid either way. But if we actually want to help people develop healthier relationships with technology, we could start by not telling them they’re powerless addicts—and instead give them the tools to change their habits.
I sat down with journalist Liz Nolan Brown to break down the bellwether case that could chip away at Section 230 protections and cause immense harm to millions of users. We discuss the lack of scientific evidence linking apps to depression, and why this moral panic is similar to the ones surrounding the telephone, novels, comic books, and television decades ago. WATCH NOW!
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