Writer: Mallory Rettig
Editor: Calista Peta
Cigarette addiction is a seemingly old-fashioned danger. The infamous rise and fall of the cigarette industry is burned into many minds, yet its reign feels like the distant past. Restrictions and regulations are in place to protect the public from multi-billion dollar addiction-profiting companies like the tobacco industry—but what if an entire industry managed to slip through the cracks? The rising social media industry is replicating the past cigarette industry’s framework, profiting from addiction by blaming overuse on consumers and marketing to children.
The Rational Addiction Theory, developed by economists Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy (1988), describes the idea that addicts are in control of their substance abuse because they must have considered the future consequences and regardless still elect to use. It frames addiction as a process—one in which the addict essentially consents to their addiction. Unsurprisingly, this theory was great for the cigarette industry. If their customers knew of the consequences and could stop at any time, what basis did the government have to intervene?
Camel, the first major commercial cigarette brand, was started in 1913. From that point on, advertisements were strategically created to target the largest possible audience, using doctor and celebrity endorsements for credibility and even marketing to children to ensure lasting customers. However, this lucrative industry built on addiction began to crumble. It all started with the 1928 study by Herbert L. Lombard and Carl R. Doerring, two Massachusetts State Department of Health researchers who found associations between heavy smoking and mouth cancer. From then on, the cigarette industry faced one of the most powerful exposés of all time; study after study proved the danger of inhaling the exact products that big cigarette companies engineered to increase revenue. As a last attempt to curb government intervention, in 1994, executives of the most powerful U.S. tobacco companies swore in a legal testimony that nicotine was not addictive and denied increasing nicotine levels in cigarettes. In 2009, the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act was passed, allowing the FDA to place regulations on the manufacture, distribution, and marketing of tobacco products. The Tobacco Control Act shaped the standards around cigarettes that are commonly accepted today, such as no underage consumption, free giveaways, or sponsorship of sports or other cultural events. And, eventually, the cigarette industry went from being seemingly innocent to government-regulated.
Graphic By: Narayani Agarwal
Now, a similar phenomenon has entered the world of addiction: social media. The framing of social media overuse as a lack of discipline and thus completely voluntary, as is consistent with the Rational Addiction Theory, encourages a new generation of young adults and children to form a new addiction at its own cost. From Instagram Reels to YouTube Shorts, social media is free to use. Yet there is still a price to pay, one that might even be considered more valuable than money: time. And as a result, the dependence that an entire generation of teens and young children is developing has somehow gone unnoticed. The monetary aspect of social media is not in the sale of a product, but rather equated to the amount of time that a platform can compel users to spend on their site. Free from taxes and largely unregulated, this has become a race to addiction: which company can get people to spend most of their lives on its app? In the cycle of exposing and regulating addictive products (demonstrated here by cigarettes), the understanding of addiction gets lost. Social media has long been characterized as addictive, but since it is a behavior and not a chemical substance, its effects are often not taken seriously. This is worrisome: how can people consent to an addiction if they aren’t aware that what they are engaging with is addictive?
Even more concerning, the optimal target demographic for social media companies is members of society whose brains have not yet fully developed: children. A concept first recognized by cigarette companies when they discovered that if they could get young people addicted to their product, there was more revenue to be made over time. As a result, cigarette advertisements began to target young people. This is also important to social media companies; however, brain plasticity is an even bigger factor. Brain plasticity allows children to learn and adapt more quickly, making them more vulnerable to developing addictive habits. The brain can take in new information and change itself at unparalleled speed. If social media companies can get their audience adapted and reliant on their product (essentially creating addictions), it would mean engagement patterns that may persist for years. And that is exactly what has been accomplished.
The difference between the cycle of cigarette abuse and social media addiction is in the regulations. In 1998, once the government recognized how damaging inhaling nicotine was to a person’s health, advertisements targeting children and teens were deemed immoral and ultimately banned by the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA). But what about the negative cognitive effects of social media? There are no true restrictions on social media for young children, which leaves a whole generation dealing with an addiction masked under the guise of the Rational Addiction Theory.
For cigarettes, the negative externalities eventually became clear. Secondhand smoke, discomfort in enclosed spaces, and public health risks were enough to change policy inside most establishments and beyond. The government placed more taxes on cigarette companies and looked for other ways to decrease the demand of the product and optimize the marginal social cost curve. But for social media, the negative externalities are not as clear. There is a decline in productivity and motivation in younger generations that, if unaddressed, will certainly not be in society’s best interest. Studies show that the average teenager spends 7 hours and 22 minutes on their phones a day, not including time spent on productive work. This amounts to roughly 112 days a year, and roughly 24 years throughout an average lifetime (78.4 in the U.S.) spent on content that rarely contributes to the growth of society, even marginally. There is also intense political polarization and misinformation intentionally engineered to draw in engagement. Instagram doesn’t care about your political views; it cares about the time you spend scrolling and the money you make for their company, which are both increased when there is shocking and often disagreeable content. It does not matter to big companies that misinformation is dangerous and is currently causing a chaotic political climate, so long as it makes a sizable profit.
They’re doing it again. Big companies are once more profiting from addiction—it’s just that this time, people don’t realize it, and the government has no real way of regulating it without breaching privacy laws. Society has faced this dilemma once before with cigarettes, and only after decades did meaningful regulations emerge. Will social media follow the same path? And if it does, how long until policymakers demand action?
Featured Image by Andres Siimon on Unsplash
