The ‘Social Media Addiction’ Narrative May Be More Harmful Than Social Media Itself
from the we're-addicted-to-calling-habits-addictions dept
This week, a major trial kicked off in Los Angeles in which hundreds of families sued Meta, TikTok, Snap, and YouTube, accusing the companies of intentionally designing their products to be addictive (though Snap and TikTok both settled on the eve of the trial) . From the Guardian:
For the first time, a huge group of parents, teens and school districts is taking on the world’s most powerful social media companies in open court, accusing the tech giants of intentionally designing their products to be addictive. The blockbuster legal proceedings may see multiple CEOs, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, face harsh questioning.
A long-awaited series of trials kicks off in Los Angeles superior court on Tuesday, in which hundreds of US families will allege that Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube’s platforms harm children. Once young people are hooked, the plaintiffs allege, they fall prey to depression, eating disorders, self-harm and other mental health issues. Approximately 1,600 plaintiffs are included in the proceedings, involving more than 350 families and 250 school districts.
The lawyers involved are explicitly using the tobacco playbook, comparing social media to cigarettes. But there’s an important point here: “social media addiction” isn’t actually a recognized clinical addiction. And a fascinating new study in Nature’s Scientific Reports suggests that our collective insistence on using addiction language might actually be making things worse for users who want to change their behavior.
The researchers conducted two studies. In the first, they surveyed a nationally representative sample of adult Instagram users and found something striking: only about 2% of users showed symptoms that would put them at risk for addiction based on the clinical criteria in the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale. But when asked directly if they felt addicted, 18% of users agreed at least somewhat. In other words, people are dramatically overestimating whether they’re actually addicted.
This matters a lot, because calling yourself addicted can have serious consequences. The study found that users who perceived themselves as more addicted (but not necessarily more habitual) reported feeling less control over their use and had made more unsuccessful attempts to change their behavior. From the study:
Self-labeling of clinical conditions (e.g., I think I’m depressed) has proved to be associated with maladaptive responses, including lowered self-efficacy and perceived control over the pathology
To test whether the addiction framing actually causes these problems rather than just correlating with them, the researchers ran a second study. They had some participants reflect on their own “addictive” Instagram use after reading language from the U.S. Surgeon General’s somewhat questionable report warning that “frequent, excessive social media use is addictive.” The control group answered the same questions but without the addiction framing first.
The results were clear and somewhat striking: simply priming people to think about their social media use as an addiction reduced their perceived control, increased both self-blame and blaming the app, and made them recall more failed attempts to cut back. The addiction framing itself creates a feeling of helplessness! The addiction to “addiction framing” may be a big part of the problem!
It is impressive that even the two-minute exposure to addiction framing in our research was sufficient to produce a statistically significant negative impact on users. This effect is aligned with past literature showing that merely seeing addiction scales can negatively impact feelings of well-being. Presumably, continued exposure to the broader media narrative around social media addiction has even larger and more profound effects. In conclusion, the addiction label does not empower users to regain control over their use. Instead, it hinders users by reducing feelings of control, increasing self-blame, and making the experience slightly less positive.
Perhaps one could argue that everyone screaming about social media addiction is doing more real harm than any actual social media product itself.
This matters because for the vast majority of heavy social media users, the problem isn’t addiction in any clinical sense. It’s habit. Habits and addictions are different psychological phenomena requiring different interventions. As the researchers note:
For the majority of social media users, however, curbing excessive use involves primarily controlling habits. Like any other habit, social media habits can become misaligned with the original motivations for use (e.g., to obtain social rewards), or conflict with other goals (e.g., sharing true information). Strong habits are notoriously difficult to control with willpower alone. For habitual social media users, the narrative of addiction and willpower-based attempts to control behavior could profitably be replaced with habit change strategies to realign their social media use with their current preferences.
Habits are context-triggered automatic behaviors. You pick up your phone in certain situations because you’ve done it a thousand times before, not because you’re experiencing withdrawal symptoms or uncontrollable cravings, like an addiction. And habit change strategies—like removing triggers, changing your environment, or practicing substitute activities—are fundamentally different from addiction treatment.
But you wouldn’t know any of this from the media coverage. The researchers analyzed three years of news articles and found that stories about “social media addiction” vastly outnumber stories about “social media habits.” The addiction framing is everywhere. And every time the Surgeon General warns about addiction, every time a lawsuit alleges platforms are designed to be addictive, every time a news story describes teens as hooked, it reinforces the idea that users are powerless victims.
Indeed, the study found that the very lawsuits that went to trial this week are likely contributing to the problem.
In addition, over the 36 assessment months, the number of articles discussing “social media habits” never approached the number of articles including the term “social media addiction” (see Fig. 2). The stories driving these effects were often lawsuits. For example, the May 2022 and October 2024 peaks for “social media addiction” related to news reporting on multiple lawsuits against Meta (owners of Instagram). In addition, the May 2023 Surgeon General’s warning about social media addiction seems to have contributed to the steady drumbeat of new articles during the April-June 2023 period for “social media addiction.”
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.
Misclassifying frequent social media and technology use as addictive has muddled public understanding of the psychology behind these behaviors and likely inhibits users’ understanding of the ways to effectively control their own behavior.
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.
Filed Under: addiction, harms, social media
Comments on “The ‘Social Media Addiction’ Narrative May Be More Harmful Than Social Media Itself”
It is an addictive narrative.
Television
When I was growing up in the 1990s, television was the “addictive” boogeyman. Some kids watch 5 hours a day!, people would say—sometimes on television. Of course, they could never really say how it would harm anyone, or how they came up with whatever “safe” limit they were pushing.
At some point, this morphed into “screen time” in general, again with no real basis for harm or limits. My “excessive” time on computers led to a fairly lucrative career for me, which I guess is an opportunity that kids today might not have. Oddly, nobody ever seems to be worrying about “could my kid be a bookworm?” (but what’s the basis for thinking paper better than “screens”?) or “could they be too into sports?” (even if they’re getting regularly injured).
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Novels were the boogeyman of the 19th century.
One of the issues where, as much as I usually like Techdirt, I disagree with the standard line here.
That said, I don’t think it’s a good idea to oppose everything that can be addictive. I’d say anything that’s pleasant can, in principle, become addictive. That’s how dopamine works, right? Doesn’t mean we should fight against everything pleasant.
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What standard line?
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That social media addiction doesn’t exist.
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Is that the standard line though? I thought I saw this up above…
Isn’t 2% a whole lot bigger than 0?
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I mean, the “standard line” here would be the overwhelmingly dominant mainstream media narrative that it is VASTLY overly prevalent, surely? Techdirt’s stance is that there is no UNIQUE form of “social media addiction”, merely that those already predisposed to such harmful coping mechanisms are potentially more prone to harmful usage of it in the same way they may also find alcohol, or gambling an outlet.
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By “here”, I meant “here on Techdirt”. So by “the standard line here”, I meant “the standard position of the Techdirt contributors”.
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Is that the standard line? I don’t think I’ve seen any of the articles here on the topic say that; only that the mainstream narrative of social media being inherently addictive is bogus. Which I would agree with.
Is there any legal precedent for acknowledging a non-physical addiction?
I now realize there must be a great corpus of knowledge about addiction, and I know practically nothing about the subject.
Maybe all addictions are “physical” since we live in a material world. In almost all cases, physical exertion is necessary, to use a phone or a PC. Dopamine is a chemical, so anything which stimulates dopamine product has a physical factor.
When I was a student at the University of Texas, I fell in with a bourgeois bunch who nevertheless dipped tobacco. I tried it myself, on occasion. Then I had liked it enough to buy my own can. That unopened can I put on a dresser in my bedroom and I sat on my couch in the living room. And a hunger stirred my limbic system. As a hunger for food, except that it was unlike the deep, dull pang for a nutrient—this was an alkaline sensation, spare and bright. I hungered for the dipping tobacco! I’ll never forget. It was a heady taste of physical addiction. I threw away my tobacco and have left it ever-shunned.
I found that and no surprise is that Vivek Murthy is now a high ranked member of Common Sense Media which explains the revised report he put out blaming social media for society’s ills.
https://www.commonsensemedia.org/press-releases/common-sense-media-adds-public-health-expertise-to-board-of-directors-with-addition-of-former-surgeon
It’s interesting that I don’t see any mention in this article of the many leaks from social media companies discussing how to make their products more addictive. And this “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.” You aren’t defining negative experiences. I know so, so many people who have left social media due to negative experiences. It’s just as correct to say “Many people seem to have truly negative experiences with it.”
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Why is it interesting? What the companies want and what is happening are often entirely different things.
I know people who got a divorce because of negative experiences with their spouse – therefore marriage is harmful.
I also know people who left their employment because of negatives experiences at the workplace – therefore employment is harmful.
Did anyone of the “so many people” leave social media due to addiction or was it because of negative interactions with other people? The latter they will never escape even if they leave social media.
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A few reasons. One, they have direct access to very granular data that isn’t public. And two, some are (although not always. Some rando engineer probably doesn’t understand the finer points of addiction)) subject matter experts. And last, it often contradicts what the companies say/release publicly. Particularly with leaks, the comments are often more candid (in both directions, less incentive to downplay and less incentive to boast) than any public statement would be.
It’s not hard causal proof but it is very, very useful.
My main gripe with a lot of studies and coverage on this issue (not just the ones you linked) is the obsession over kids, as if anyone over some arbitrary age is magically immune to whatever harms social media may or may not cause. And apparently we’re super certain that magic number is 18 because… reasons. Would your take change if the focus wasn’t almost exclusively on young people?
What explains the masses who stay glued to twitter despite being trans, jewish, anti-fascist, hating Musk, etc., if not behavioral addiction? I get that ‘addiction’ has clinical baggage, but swapping labels from ‘addiction’ to ‘habit’ doesn’t make the actual experience any less worrying. I don’t mean chemical dependence– that’s a different thing obviously– but behavioral addiction is real: gambling and compulsive shopping aren’t chemical, yet they’re genuinely harmful and more than just habitual. Social media uses the same reinforcement mechanics: variable rewards, social cues, endless novelty, and deliberate engineering to capture attention.
The distinction matters for treatment. But we shouldn’t let designers off the hook or minimize harms. Whether you want to call it habit or behavioral addiction, platforms that design for ever-growing engagement numbers rather than Resonance deserve some level of scrutiny. Users deserve practical tools to regain control rather than just being told they’re powerless.
To be clear, I’m not arguing the tech is always inherently harmful, I’m arguing the businesses that power it (algorithm-centric social media) are almost all inherently ‘evil’ (due to the fact that their ultimate god is the shareholder) and do not want the best for you. They will do everything they can to squeeze out extra seconds of engagement and ads on eyeballs. They can, will, and are employing psychologists to figure out how to manipulate people into staying on the platform longer, digging deeper into a walled garden and dragging their friends into it. And no matter how you slice it, the algorithms that power these feeds will outmatch you no matter how much you try to curate your feed– they don’t care about anything except keeping you scrolling. (Obviously, BlueSky is excluded from some of these complaints, since you actually can architect your own feed and you aren’t subject to an IPO, so far. And obvious exclusion for pure messaging apps like Signal as well. But not Discord.)
How can we argue with a straight face that this is something we want our lives to orbit around? Because maybe y’all don’t see it, but as someone who has separated themselves from traditional social media, I would say over 1/4 of the population in my metro area is at a harmful level of engagement with their devices when out in public. The level where it’s interfering with experiencing the moment, or literally just moving and walking around without running into people. And they are almost always scrolling an infinity feed. If people can’t prioritize walking to work, or the bus stop, or driving a car, over using their phone, that’s a major societal health problem, whatever you want to call it– and it’s way way more than 2% of people doing that. So I can only imagine how bad it is within their own homes.
But I don’t think most people want to admit they are addicted, to themselves or to a doctor, so the self-reported numbers leave a bit to be desired. (Yes, I know they aren’t directly asking ‘are you addicted,’ but people aren’t stupid. They know what those questions are getting at. Not to mention the vagueness and subjectiveness of the rarely-likely scale used.)
The paper gets into this a bit, but this is a bit of a misnomer. People colloquially use the term ‘addicted’ for things that don’t fit the clinical definition. The paper doesn’t really seem to tease out people who are overestimating actual addiction, vs just using the looser term, which is unfortunate.
The term addiction is essentially “negative habit forming, and some people struggle to break the habit to varying degrees”. Part of the problem is we don’t really have an English word for it, habit isn’t quite right, it doesn’t have the negative connotation. It’s more like… maladaptive habit. It’s similar to how people use things like ‘OCD’ to describe a habit, or discomfort with not doing something, even if it isn’t clinically OCD.
It gets even muddier when you’re not fully on the scale for addiction symptoms. The criteria they used was a score of 24 (and no responses below the midpoint), but what happens for someone who scores high on 5/6?
The thing is, laypeople would often colloquially call that an addiction.
I don’t quite get this. People have been doing this normatively for decades before the Surgeon General’s claim, back in the days of Evercrack. That said, I’m not sure it’s just “heavy use” per se (some of it is, you see people use it for e.g. “I’m addicted to reading”). But it’s more often heavy use combined with a recognition that they should do less/want to do it less.
That’s the thing; it doesn’t? There are a ton of services I use regularly, that I don’t think about otherwise. They’re not habit forming in the same way. Like, I can’t recall anyone ever even joking they were addicted to IRC, despite spending many hours daily on it. (Same with Discord, for that matter)
If this study is correct, it reduces it. But even many physical addicts have some agency. Honestly, the study is very interesting, because addicts quitting their addiction is a thing, even before you get into the colloquial usage issue.
That said, I’m not sure how you talk about the issue while also dealing with that ~2%, that’s still going to lead to things like lawsuits in the news.
Inherent is not the word you’re looking for. It just means belonging to the basic nature of something, it is not a synonym for universal. Something can be inherent and not affect everyone. Gambling is inherently harmful. Not everyone develops a gambling addiction (a quick Google puts it at ~1-2%). Same with alcohol, etc. The inherently part just means that the harm originates with the gambling, it’s not a byproduct.
That said, just because something affects only a group doesn’t mean we only do targeted solutions (see again: gambling, alcohol etc). Although, those are better if it is possible. But sometimes we do society wide limitations because we can’t easily target at-risk groups, if the pros outweigh the cons.
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We do have a word for it, though. In clinical contexts, such as the ICD or DSM, the term used for the formation of a negatively impactful habit is Compulsion or Compulsive Behavior (or Disorder). Addiction refers specifically to something which is dependency-forming rather than habit-forming, in which case it’s specifically a Compulsion. The use of ‘addiction’ in the context that’s being referred to is a medical misnomer as what’s being discussed is a psychological compulsion to check Instagram, not a psychological (nor chemical) dependency to checking Instagram.
This is also why neither the DSM or ICD recognizes the other big elephant in the room, ‘porn addiction’ as being an actual thing, and why the ICD nebulously recognizes CSBD (Compulsive sexual behavior disorder).