<
https://www.techdirt.com/2026/04/03/the-social-media-addiction-verdicts-are-built-on-a-scientific-premise-that-experts-keep-telling-us-is-wrong/>
"Last week, I wrote about why the social media addiction verdicts against Meta
and YouTube should worry anyone who cares about the open internet. The short
version: plaintiffs’ lawyers found a clever way to recharacterize editorial
decisions about third-party content as “product design defects,” effectively
gutting Section 230 without anyone having to repeal it. The legal theory will
be weaponized against every platform on the internet, not just the ones you
hate. And the encryption implications of the New Mexico decision alone should
terrify everyone. You can read that post for more details on the legal
arguments.
But there’s a separate question lurking underneath the legal one that deserves
its own attention: is the scientific premise behind all of this even right? Are
these platforms actually causing widespread harm to kids? Is “social media
addiction” a real thing that justifies treating Instagram like a pack of
Marlboros? We’ve covered versions of this debate in the past, mostly looking at
studies. But there are other forms of expert analysis as well.
Long-time
Techdirt reader and commenter Leah Abram pointed us to a newsletter
from Dr. Katelyn Jetelina and Dr. Jacqueline Nesi that digs into exactly this
question with the kind of nuance that’s been almost entirely absent from the
mainstream coverage. Jetelina runs the widely read “Your Local Epidemiologist”
newsletter, and Nesi is a clinical psychologist and professor at Brown who
studies technology’s effects on young people.
And what they’re saying lines up almost perfectly with what we’ve been saying
here at
Techdirt for years, often to enormous pushback: /social media does
not appear to be
inherently harmful to children/. What appears to be true is
that there is a
small group of kids for whom it’s genuinely problematic. And
the interventions that would actually help those kids look nothing like the
blanket bans and sweeping product liability lawsuits that politicians and trial
lawyers are currently pursuing. And those broad interventions do real harm to
many more people, especially those who are directly helped by social media."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
