I was already working on a piece for this week about the multiple state and federal lawsuits claiming that Facebook and Instagram harm teens, cause addiction and depression etc. when I saw the headlines saying Meta had agreed to settle many of these claims (most of the state ones anyway) by paying up to $18 billion in fines, with a majority of that coming in the form of annual payments that are to be used for online safety programs for children. According to reports, 30 percent of the total amount will only be paid if TikTok and YouTube also implement controls such as strict age limits, daily usage limits, etc. which Meta has agreed to. Meta is also going to turn off default features such as auto-video plays and “like” counts (but apparently these could be turned on again by users without too much trouble). A block on night-time use by teens, which will extend from midnight to 6 am, however, can’t be disabled except by a parent. There will be an option for users to have a non-algorithmic feed, and Meta has agreed to a number of other terms, including the use of an independent auditor, and a prohibition from making “further false, misleading, or deceptive statements around its safety features.”
So that’s it then, right? Why I am I even writing about this after Meta has agreed to all that? Clearly, the company is basically admitting that it did all the things the lawsuits claim that it did – that it deliberately made its products as addictive as possible, even when it knew that this would cause harm; that it targeted children specifically, and ignored its own internal research showing that Instagram in particular causes emotional harm, depression, etc.; and that it hid or lied about that research, and deliberately made its products worse even when it knew about the harms they might cause. And this isn’t the first settlement Meta has agreed to in similar cases: earlier in August, it agreed to pay a total of almost $1 billion in a case in New Mexico, after a judge said the social media giant is a “public nuisance” akin to air pollution – the first successful state prosecution of Meta based on child safety. In March, meanwhile, a jury in California awarded a woman $6 million because she said she was addicted to Instagram since she was a child and that it caused her mental distress, including the development of a body dysmorphic disorder.
If you follow these kinds of cases, it probably won’t surprise you that Meta didn’t admit to anything in any of these settlements. It simply agreed to drop the cases in return for making payments – payments that, according to my calculations, amount to about 0.005 percent of Meta’s revenue. Even the latest $18 billion mega-settlement works out to less than one-tenth of one percent of the company’s revenue. In other words, Meta paid because it was worth it to get the cases out of the public eye, not because it actually believes any of the allegations against it are true – and because its lawyers argued there was a non-zero chance of the result being even more expensive, as much as $200 billion according to some estimates (the stock rose after the settlement news). As for the changes it has agreed to make to the ways that its apps work, they are in many cases reversible – which means they are likely to be about as effective as Australia’s social-media ban for teens has been (which is to say not at all) – and I would argue are cosmetic at best.
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To answer the question I raised earlier, I’m writing about this because despite all of the publicity around the allegations against Meta since the state cases behind this latest lawsuit were launched in 2023, and despite high-profile cases like whistleblower Frances Haugen’s “Facebook Papers,” there is still no conclusive proof that Meta’s products a) cause social-media “addiction,” whatever that term means; b) actually cause emotional distress, mental illness or any other form of harm to teens or anyone else – or at least enough of them to justify this kind of case; or c) that the company itself was convinced of these harms and ignored them deliberately because it cared more about its revenues than the health of children using its products (lots of allegations but not much proof). Before the settlement, Kentucky’s attorney-general said that the case would prove harm, and that “we did it with the Tobacco Settlement in the 1990s. We did it with the companies behind the opioid crisis. We’ll do it again with Meta.” But there is simply no way in which Instagram is even remotely similar to tobacco or to Oxycodone or any other drug.
As regular Torment Nexus readers know, this is a field that I have plowed many times in the history of this newsletter. In the fourth issue, in October of 2024, I wrote about what I called the “moral panic” around social-media use and teen depression. In December of that year I wrote about Australia’s ban on social media for kids under 13 and how it was misguided. Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about how the UK’s online-harms legislation was a dumpster fire. I have argued that we should help teens to use social media in effective ways rather than banning them from it (although more and more countries seem to have decided to do the latter), and I’ve tried multiple times to point out that when it comes to the connection between social media and teen depression or other mental-health challenges there is no smoking gun. Not surprisingly, I don’t think that a settlement of some state lawsuits – regardless of how many billions of dollars are involved – changes that fundamental fact. If there is anything in the cases to date that might change my mind on this, I have yet to find it. If you have, please share it!
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Bottom line: It’s a moral panic
In a nutshell, it’s my belief that concerns about social media in general, and specifically about its use and the harmful emotional effects on teens, are a moral panic not unlike the ones that we have seen relating to a) comic books, b) video games and c) suggestive lyrics in popular music. Then, as now, the supposed ills of those things were blamed for every negative aspect of young people’s lives, from late nights or bad grades in school to teen pregnancy. And then, as now, there was a small kernel of truth at the center of some of the concerns: Is it good for your child to exclusively consume comic books for hours at a time, at the expense of his or her schoolwork? Of course not. Is the same true of video games? Probably. And is it good for your child to spend hours endlessly scrolling on a mobile app, looking at photos of “influencers” who pretend to have much better lives than they actually do? Probably not. At the risk of repeating things you may already have read, I’m going to summarize some of the facts that led me to this conclusion:
— The claims made by Jonathan Haidt, a professor at NYU whose books and magazine articles have helped fuel this panic, simply don’t hold water: Candice Odgers, a psychology professor at UC Irvine and a leading researcher in this field, has said that Haidt’s suggestion that digital technologies are causing an epidemic of mental illness “is not supported by science,” adding that “hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt” and found very little in the way of causation. Andrew Przybylski, a professor of human behavior at the University of Oxford, has said that extraordinary claims such as those made by Haidt “require extraordinary evidence [and] right now, I’d argue he doesn’t have that.”
— Haidt often cites research by Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State, to support his claims of a causal link between smartphone use and anxiety in teens. But in a study published in Nature, Przybylski tried to reproduce some of her findings and was unable to show more than a mild correlation. In fact, he said the average correlation between screen time and well-being “was analogous to the correlation between wearing glasses and well being,” and therefore might just be a rounding error or statistical anomaly. The impact of smartphone use on the emotional well-being of younger users appears to be more or less the same as the impact of eating potatoes on a regular basis.
— A meta-analysis of 226 studies in 2022 involving more than a quarter of a million participants found that the association between social media and feelings of well-being was “indistinguishable from zero.” Twenge found that teens who spend a lot of time on their phones were two times more likely to suffer from depression, but as Odgers pointed out, this “suggests not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers.” In a study in 2021, close to 45 percent of teens said using social media makes them feel better, not worse.
— The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report in 2023 that stated: “Available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.” Manchester researchers noted that while one meta-analysis found that increased social media use is associated with “a range of negative mental health outcomes,” a second found “no evidence that time spent on social media is correlated with adolescent mental health problems.”
— Christopher Ferguson, a psychologist with Stetson University, noted in a recent piece that despite repeated references in the media to how “dopamine surges” explain why you can’t stop scrolling, or how Silicon Valley does its best to exploit this brain chemical in order to get us hooked on its products with things like the infinite scroll, this is a form of pseudoscience designed to “legitimize a moral panic about behaviors that trouble certain segments of society.” Research shows that dopamine spikes caused by drugs and alcohol can help induce physical dependency, but there is no evidence whatsoever that a similar thing happens with scrolling on Facebook or Instagram.
Is “addictive-like” the best we can do?
If all of this is true, then why did a California court award a woman $6 million for being addicted to Instagram and suffering mental-health challenges as a result? Because the jury came to believe that Meta deliberately made its products as “addicting” as possible through features such as auto-play, the infinite scroll, likes and comments, etc. – and that it ignored internal research that showed such features could harm vulnerable young users. Was there any proof of either of these statements? Clearly there was enough for a majority of the jury, but juries are not known for their fine grasp of nuance (or science). The biggest problem with this case and others like it, as I have noted before, is that in order to get around the First Amendment and Meta’s Section 230 protections, these cases claim that they are aimed not at the content of the service, but at the way it is designed or built – in the same way someone might sue a car manufacturer for a defective engine.
As Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote at Reason magazine, however, it’s obvious that a big part of what the lawyers in these cases were arguing was harmful was the actual content that users were allegedly harmed by and/or addicted to, not the mechanical function of an algorithm or the structure of the social network’s website or apps. Mike Masnick at Techdirt said: “Imagine that you open Instagram and everything looks the same, but every single post is a video of paint drying. So there is the same infinite scroll, and the same autoplaying of videos, and the same kinds of algorithmic recommendations and intrusive notifications, following and liking features, etc. “Is anyone addicted or harmed? Is anyone suing? Of course not. Because infinite scroll is not inherently harmful. Autoplay is not inherently harmful. Algorithmic recommendations are not inherently harmful. These features only matter because of the content they deliver.”
As Kevin Williamson at The Dispatch put it, social-media companies design products like Facebook and Instagram to be addictive, according to the plaintiffs, but Instagram clearly isn’t addictive in the same way that drugs like cocaine or nicotine are. “Designed to be addictive is another way of saying that tech companies figure out what their customers respond positively to and then … do more of that.” The use of terms like “dopamine rush” make it seem as though the addictiveness of social media is a scientific fact, but it is anything but. In fact, there’s no evidence that social media either produces dopamine or that doing so causes any real physical addiction. The only thing the California court had in the case of the woman who claimed she was harmed by her Instagram “addiction” was comments from researchers who said the behavior of people using social-media apps was considered to be “addictive-like.” Is that how the law works now?
Given the fact that there seems to be evidence of mental-health challenges among young people, shouldn’t we be focused on trying to figure out why, and solve that problem, rather than pinning the whole thing on their use of social media or smartphones? As Odgers said in her Nature review of Haidt’s book, even if we accept that there is a generation that needs help with their mental health, it doesn’t do them any good to “tell stories that are unsupported by research.” Two Australian legislators who argued against the social-media ban said that not only will it not help the children it is meant to help, it will make it harder for kids in marginalized groups to find support from their peers. For children in remote, or vulnerable situations, they said, “social media offers a lifeline. It connects children with disability to peers, resources, and communities.”
Instead of trying to figure out all of the various complicating factors that can affect teen mental health and emotional well-being, whether it’s hormones or stress in the home or at school, or perceptions of inadequacy from other forms of media, it’s a lot easier – and therefore more appealing – to lay the blame either on Facebook and Instagram, or on social-media tools in general. This is a common trap that human beings fall into when confronted with complex questions, according to Pete Etchells, a professor of psychology who spoke with The Atlantic for a recent piece entitled “What If It’s Not The Phones?” As Etchells put it: “We try to answer the question of ‘What one big thing can explain this?’ The answer, in my view, is that there isn’t one big thing.” But we keep looking for one, and social media and smartphones are a convenient target.
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