Meta recently has agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion over a decade as part of a legal settlement over allegations that Facebook and Instagram were designed in ways that contributed to social media addiction among children and teenagers.
Strong evidence exists that a subset of adolescents exhibit behaviours resembling addiction: compulsive use, inability to cut back, neglect of sleep or schoolwork, and continued use despite harm. Strong evidence also exists that heavy or problematic social media use is associated with poorer mental health, sleep problems, anxiety, depression and reduced well-being. What remains debated is whether “social media addiction” should be considered a formal clinical addiction comparable to gambling disorder or substance addiction. Many researchers prefer the term “problematic social media use”.
Equally adults can develop compulsive tendencies such as checking your emails or Teams messages 20 times a day without them being necessarily addicted. Heavy use, professional use, entertainment, habit, and addiction are different things.
Every so often, somebody discovers that they have spent 45 minutes staring at their phone despite only intending to check the weather. The usual conclusion is a moral one: we blame ourselves for a lack of discipline. In reality, the modern social media ecosystem is designed to make stopping unusually difficult. Platforms are not rewarded for helping us log off. They are rewarded for keeping us engaged. The longer we stay, the more advertisements we see and the more data we generate.
One of the most effective tricks is the infinite scroll. Newspapers end. Books have chapters. Even television programmes have credits. Social media feeds, however, never end. Remove the natural stopping points and people lose the moments where they might otherwise ask themselves whether they have had enough. Add the occasional fascinating article, amusing video or outrageous news story and the result is a reward system remarkably similar to a slot machine. You never know when the next interesting item will appear, so you keep scrolling just a little longer.
Doomscrolling takes this a step further by exploiting a peculiarity of human nature. Our ancestors survived because they paid more attention to danger than to pleasant scenery. A potential threat was always more important than a sunny afternoon. Thousands of years later, our brains still work much the same way. We are naturally drawn to bad news, conflict, crisis and controversy. Social media algorithms quickly learn this. If alarming content keeps us looking at the screen for longer, they tend to show us more of it.
It’s funny how we often keep scrolling in search of reassurance. We tell ourselves that one more article, one more video or one more expert opinion will finally make sense of an uncertain world. Instead, we end up trapped in an endless cycle of information consumption. The sabre-toothed tiger may be long gone, but it has been replaced by an infinite feed of crises, outrage and speculation. Our brains, unfortunately, seem unable to tell the difference.
The settlement does not appear to say that algorithms themselves are inherently illegal or harmful. Rather, it reflects growing concern about the way specific design choices around algorithms, notifications, infinite scroll, autoplay and social validation features can encourage excessive engagement, particularly among younger users. Meta seems to be accepting constraints on those features for teenagers without abandoning the data-driven recommendation systems that underpin its business model.
What is much less clear is whether Meta has agreed to fundamentally change the core recommendation algorithms that rank content for adults. The average US teenager spends approximately 3 1/4 hours per day on social media, which may tend to decrease with the changes, whereas the average American adult spends just short of 2 1/2 hours.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that we are trying to rescue our children from a habit that many of us practise daily ourselves. They may soon spend less time on social media, but unless we are prepared to put down our own phones, all we have really done is teach the next generation that addiction is perfectly acceptable once you are old enough.
