Addiction

While driving home recently, I passed by a college campus. It was quiet, but a young man was walking across the road, and I slowed and watched as he strolled over the crosswalk, one hand in his pocket, the other cradling his phone. He had yellow earbuds showing beneath his neatly trimmed hair.

He was oblivious to his surroundings.

On some level, I'm sure he was aware of his general surroundings, but on another level he was somewhere else in time and space. He was in the Zone.

As of March 2026, court proceedings have found Meta (Facebook and family) and YouTube (Google/Alphabet) liable for designing addictive features that fuel youth mental health crises. The addictive features named include behaviors highlighted in these pages before: 

Infinite Scroll: Allows for an endless supply of content, creating a seamless experience that makes it difficult to stop.

Algorithmic Recommendations: Curated feeds designed to maximize engagement and "hook" users through personalized, often extreme, content.

Autoplay Videos: Videos that automatically play one after another, keeping users engaged without active effort.

Push Notifications: Alerts designed to trigger a dopamine release, creating a compulsion to check the phone immediately.

Beauty Filters: Specifically mentioned in suits regarding Instagram, these contribute to body dysmorphia and anxiety. 

The background: a young woman, "Kaley," sued Meta and YouTube over her "childhood addiction to social media." This from the BBC website as the article continued: "Jurors found that Meta, which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, and Google, owner of YouTube, intentionally built addictive social media platforms that harmed the 20-year old's mental health.

"The woman...was awarded $6m (£4.5m) in damages, a result likely to have implications for hundreds of similar cases now winding their way through US courts.

"Meta and Google said they disagreed with the verdict and intended to appeal.

"Meta said: "Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app. We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously as every case is different, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online."

"A spokesperson for Google said: "This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site."

Also named as defendants were SnapChat and TikTok "but both companies reached undisclosed settlements with Kaley prior to trial."

Another verdict in New Mexico determined that Meta was liable for endangering children by exposing them to sexually explicit material, and providing a means of contact for sexual predators.

Cases like these are, in their own way, bedrock to the concepts of freedom and responsibility in a modern society.

We successfully put alcohol behind an age threshold for purchase, but the truth is, if alcohol is made, it can be obtained. Prohibition was tried, and it only resulted in more organized and clever means of production and procuring. Once upon a time possessing/smoking pot was a potential crime, now it's a cottage industry and a tax revenue for various states.

The details of Kaley's case provide problems for simple fixes and demands for age limits and other platform responsibilities. 

"Kaley said she started using Instagram aged nine and YouTube aged six, and encountered no attempts to block her because of her age."

Spending all her free time on social media, Kaley "said she was 10 years old when she started having feelings of anxiety and depression, disorders for which she would be diagnosed years later by a therapist."

Filters allowed the young girl to enhance her appearance, leading to "body dysmorphia." We have discussed the widespread use of "filter face" in these pages, and the idea that many users actually believe that they look the way the filters show them. Young men in particular have taken to "Looksmaxing," which might involve extreme hair styling, starvation, working out, tattoing, or even breaking bones to create a better facial structure."

The problem with any product designed simply for consumption (as opposed to a necessity) is that it's being addictive is a major selling point. Why do I need a donut when I can get carrots and beef? If people have trouble meeting their caloric requirements, a company needn't even advertise to get customers. Their product will be grabbed as quickly as its created. If there are far more calories produced than required, the company will look at flavor enhancements, extra "reward" features (mouth feel, sweetness, a "buzz" from consuming) to convince the customer to buy their calories as opposed to another option.

In its infancy, social media was Facebook and Twitter, which prevailed after sites like Friendster and MySpace had helped create an interest but lost users. With the advent of the podcast and influencers, YouTube shows and sites like TikTok and Instagram, young people in particular began their relentless quest for new, more, different - and to be one of those who made the platforms so popular. 

But the question remains: are the filters the problem, or the common and age-old problem of valuing the physical, especially among young people? Kids have always been victim to wasting time - goofing off, playing games, socializing. Who determines how much and of what? "Bad" ideas can be found - in the old days, it might have been a turned down page in a racy book, or a purloined copy of Playboy. What is the responsibility of the parents to monitor what and how much a kid consumes? What is a kid? The age of consent varies from place to place - 16 in the UK, 18 in the US, 14 in Germany. 

And, especially in the era of AI, how would monitoring of a "kid" be done? When material came into a home via a cable, mom and dad could try to attach parental controls to it. Some version of that can be added to a VPN, but that doesn't stop someone from accessing the Internet through any one of the many ways to get online, including simply through a mobile phone.

And in a culture that, at least in part, wants to "protect sex workers," will telling OnlyFans performers they're doing something wrong by providing "outlets" be workable?

The questions have been around as long as people have interacted with one another, though certainly not with such a potent ability to corrupt as we seem to have created today. While not a new gamble, the stakes have never seemed quite so high.