Is social media more like cigarettes or junk food?


I do not use TikTok. I have also stopped using Twitter/X. I closed my Facebook account a long time ago, much to the chagrin of some friends who use it to advertise events and get-togethers that they think I would be interested in. When asked by them why I limit myself this way, I tell them that I dislike the ethics of Facebook and its parent company Meta and that I am not at all worried about the phenomenon of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). If I miss an event because it was only announced on Facebook, it does not bother me. I know what things I value and find ways to learn about them.

I do use the internet a great deal but when it comes to communicating with other people, email and text messages are about it. Even there, I avoid group chats and emails because they often degenerate into squabbles that I think are petty and have no interest in.

But I have been following the TikTok issue, and the on again-off again attempts to ban it because the data it has about its user base might supposedly be given to the Chinese government by its parent company ByteDance. I am sure that that company, like all social media companies, has amassed a vast amount of data on its users but what strategic value this information on mostly young people might have that would benefit the Chinese government is a bit mysterious to me. I wonder if the opposition to TikTok is largely driven by dislike that a foreign-owned company has developed a product that has crushed its US competitors such as Instagram Reels, Snapchat, and YouTube Shorts, and those companies are behind the lobbying efforts to shut it down. The reaction to the open source AI chatbot DeepSeek developed by a Chinese company is similar.

While the fight over TikTok is supposedly over national security concerns, others argue that it and other social media are harmful to its users and need to be regulated for that reason. Social media definitely seems to be addictive, with many people spending hours scrolling through their feeds. But does that cause long-term damage in any physical or psychological sense?

In trying to understand this issue and that of social media generally and the extent to which it might be harmful, I found that this article by Cal Newport provided a nice way to think about it, asking which of two other addictive habits it should be compared to: cigarettes (which are highly dangerous because they can kill you) or junk food (which is also bad for you but not quite as lethal, as far as we know). The former is now under strict regulation (and even bans on its use by children and teens) while the latter has only resulted in calls for persuasion tactics by parents and others.

Newport writes that it used to be the case in the 19th century that cigarettes were freely available to everyone and children as young as five years of age could be seen puffing away contentedly. Long before the lethality of cigarettes had been conclusively demonstrated (in the teeth of lies by the tobacco industry), the sight of little children smoking was unsettling enough that bans on the sale to minors were imposed, with New Jersey passing the first in 1883, and by 1890 more than half the states had passed similar bans.

But while warnings about the dangers and addictiveness of junk food had been around since the 1970s, no similar restrictions or bans were imposed, even though some argued that some ‘cereals’ that consisted of more than 50% sugar should really be labeled as candy. Instead we were given nutritional advice while advertisers were allowed to continue targeting children.

There seems to be a change brewing.

Last fall, Australia passed a first-of-its-kind national law that requires social-media platforms—including TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, X, and Instagram—to ban users under the age of sixteen. These companies were given twelve months to figure out how to enforce the law or face fines that could exceed thirty million dollars. Industry groups predictably complained, but the bold move has been broadly popular among the public. A YouGov poll revealed that seventy-seven per cent of Australians supported the law.

The question now is not whether these platforms are harmful to kids (they are) or even whether some action should be taken (it should). Instead, we have to decide whether, to children, social media is more like a Big Mac or a Marlboro. If the former, then the U.S. may be on the right track. If the latter, then Australia might provide a better example.

Florida seems to be following Australia’s example when its “conservative-majority legislature recently banned social-media accounts for children under fourteen.”

Newport argues that which way the US goes may depend on more than the science of social media addiction.

I asked Meg Jones, a professor in Georgetown’s Communications, Culture, and Technology program who specializes in technology and law, how the legal system categorizes different kinds of possible harms to children. “We impose outright bans for kids when activities involve permanent or hard-to-reverse consequences (tattoos, contracts), addiction (tobacco, gambling), activities with high potential for exploitation (hazardous and entertainment jobs), and parents unable to assess or manage risks,” Jones told me in an e-mail. Cigarettes warrant a ban because we fear that childhood use could lead to a lifetime of addiction, increasing risks of lung cancer, heart disease, and other health problems. The consumption of junk food, on the other hand, seems like an activity that can be controlled by parents, and which, in moderation, might lead less directly to permanent damage.

How does social media fare against these more formal standards? Jones focussed on two considerations: “whether the platforms have redeeming development value, and whether parents can provide effective guidance.” Early social media was often described in utopian terms, and few people argued that it was harmful or addictive; in that context, a ban would have seemed arbitrary. But, in recent years, the utopian sheen has been stripped away, which casts doubt on the idea that social media benefits children enough to outweigh its harms. Meanwhile, parents increasingly lament their inability to control their children’s online obsessions. All of which suggests that, from a legal standpoint, platforms such as Instagram and TikTok may have key traits in common with tobacco.

I do not envy the parents of young children today who are under pressure to provide them with the latest mobile devices that are the gateway to all these apps. Being able to reach their children in an emergency and for them to be able to reach the parents is a definite benefit. I suspect (hope) that we might see the growth of stripped down devices whose sole function is to receive and make calls. We can call them – telephones?

Comments

  1. Holms says

    We know the Tiktok fuss is not based on information security with respect to the CCP, for the simple reason that they already have access to that, and always have had access to it, as Facebook and its peers have been selling user information all along. Information security is a pretext to mask what I think are two much more likely contributors: US social media companies are its competitors and so will benefit from any harm done to Tiktok (and may even be in the running to buy it), and the conservative voting base can easily be made to hate anything related to China. Information security is what they’re going with because it plays better than ‘because its Chinese’.

    I enjoy the fact that the person comparing social media to cigarette addiction is called Newport.

  2. Lassi Hippeläinen says

    Sounds like Putin. After 2014 he took control of many Russian subsidiaries of “western” companies (nominally “buying” them at a offer-you-cannot-refuse price), and gave them to his trusted oligarchs. Forced “selling” of TikTok-USA to Xitter is no different.
    Social media are by nature monopoly-friendly. Everybody must join the platform that everybody else uses. Emerging competitors must be cut early, because nits grow up to be lice. It’s a security issue. Business security.

  3. JM says

    There are a bunch of different issues going on here at once.
    There is a national security aspect to social media and internet data in general but it’s just the leading edge of what will eventually have to be dealt with. Something like the EU personal information control will have to be implemented eventually. Information about American users will be hosted on servers in the US, availability of information controlled and in the case of conflict they can be cut off.
    Social media is kind of a drug substitute for actual social interaction. It can be good if your not getting any otherwise but too much is bad for you. How bad depends on what social media you are using. Part of the reason for the growth of the new right is young boys learning terrible habits in online games and on social media.
    Social media can be used to spread propaganda. This is true of any media but social media is particularly subject to mixing news/advertising/entertainment, organized propaganda programs and propaganda by other countries.
    Social media has raised a generation that expects continuous and instant contact with their friends. People keep their phones next to their bed and get up in the middle of the night to answer messages. People judge their friends based on how fast they respond. People coordinate actives with their friends on the fly. People expect to be able to contact other people instantly in emergencies. This is a big cultural change. Some of this is bad, some good, some just change.

  4. Deepak Shetty says

    . I closed my Facebook account a long time ago

    Ditto (probably more than a decade ago for me) -- but I guess atleast my reasons at that time were different. When we first moved to the US , Facebook (though at that time Orkut was popular among Indians ) was a good way to keep in touch with old colleagues and classmates and watch them get married have kids etc atleast via their pictures. I think the earlier days were closer to what linked in is now(everyone has happy lives , everyone is doing great and taking wonderful vacations and is a superb chef and all the kids are angels stepped down to planet earth) -- and as I used it more it did become a little bit obsessive -- why did this pic get likes but not that one ? why did my spouse get more comments than me ? why is this pic not looking as good ? Why did someone (me) who rarely bothers with typos in his comments suddenly start putting his marketer hat to see which text can drive engagement. Why did someone with a mostly cynical(pessimistically optimist) outlook towards life suddenly become so optimistically cheerful in my outward behavior? I stopped using it -- all the data that has since come out about Facebook’s policies just made that decision seem more and more correct
    The Facebook campus is just 20 minutes from where i live and by all other respects would be super to work at (salary , benefits, commute , latest tech etc -- all for the low price of a$$0’s in the C suite) -- but how does someone with kids work for a place that knowingly suppresses data that shows that their sites are more likely to cause teenagers to commit acts of self harm ? The fact that my fellow programmer brethren dont see an issue working for Facebook infuriates me(because hey stock options! RSUs!)
    The tragedy is what social media could have been and what it became.

    I do not envy the parents of young children today who are under pressure to provide them with the latest mobile devices that are the gateway to all these app

    Yes -- losing battle. My kids are addicted but they seem to be addicted to the video games , not social media -- jury’s still out on which one is better. We’ve held out on providing a mobile device but everyone in the school carpool already ahs so there is a lot of peer pressure and we will cave soon I guess. Other parents have resorted to all kinds of snoopware -- something that I am principally opposed to but where my spouse and I have diametrically opposite views (A recipe for domestic bliss, it is not).
    On the other hand I think of all the things I did by virtue of the fact that my parents did not know computers -- My first programming script that I was proud of, as a teen, was a script that went and downloaded a free video link (one free video a week!) from a page without opening a browser --

  5. jenorafeuer says

    A lot of people (including Youtuber Legal Eagle) have talked about how, frankly, this seems to be more about ‘popular social media company that isn’t American’ than it is about them specifically being Chinese, as TikTok is no worse in terms of customer data retention and algorithm manipulation than most other social media companies, and is in fact better than several of them. Part of the problem is that the U.S. is, on a global scale, bad at privacy laws. Partly for general ‘free speech absolutist’ reasons, and partly because many of the big data gatherers started in the U.S. and pushed back on privacy legislation there, while other countries were pushed to implement privacy rules in an attempt to keep much of their data from going overseas. The U.S. is now on the ‘wrong’ side of this for the first time, and they’re not reacting well.

    (On top of that, TikTok’s ownership is a bit of a consortium, and it’s not actually hosted in China, but someplace like the Caymans, I think? U.S. companies actually already own a good chunk of it to my understanding.)

    @Lassi Hippeläinen:
    Yeah, I’ve heard a good bit about the fall of LiveJournal from folks who were active on it at the time. It was literally bought by the Russians because there was a significant amount of Russian dissident organization going on there, and they literally organized a state-sponsored sale in order to get at the dissidents in question and make it harder for such a group to form again. A lot of the English-speaking members of LiveJournal hadn’t even known there were a large number of Russians on the site until then.

  6. KG says

    This Guardian article largely blames TicToc for the recent finding that half of the UK’s “Gen Z” would prefer a dictator to democracy:

    There, the algorithm is serving up young men and boys an endless stream of content, either consciously or subconsciously, promoting strength, “common sense”, traditional ideas around gender roles and incessant railing against wokeism. There’s a reason for Donald Trump’s unhinged attack on “woke policies” in federal aviation, which is the content swirling these social platforms right now.

    Pushback from the right against “liberal-elite dogma” and “political correctness gone mad” is as old as time. What is different is how TikTok has turbocharged these ideas into the mainstream for young people – into teens who, by and large, aren’t engaged with politics. Those who previously might have been more interested in drinking cider and getting off with girls.

    Almost three-quarters of 18- to 24-year-olds visited TikTok in May 2024, spending an average of 64 minutes a day on the site. Among those in their early to mid teens, saturation is closer to 90%, and surveys show it is their favoured single news source.

    “Blaming the media” is the oldest cliche in the book. But to discuss the causes of the appeal of populism in the young without putting it in the context of TikTok’s capacity for mind control is to discuss causes of drug use without considering how heroin makes people feel. When the Biden administration came close to banning TikTok just weeks ago, it may have been partially on the grounds that the Chinese could use it to dip into our data like popcorn, but it was also on the understanding that it is a very sophisticated tool in a “cognitive warfare campaign”.

    The TikTok algorithms may or may not be worse in terms of serving up authoritarian propaganda than other social media sites, but (a) it’s the one Gen Z use, and (b) the Chinese government have a very obvious motive for propagandising against democracy and in favour of the “strong leader”. So does Trump, which may explain why he’s suspended the ban on TikTok.

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