I find it weird that this focuses specifically upon "short form video" as though that's the dangerous or addictive element.

It's like saying drinking consistently throughout the day is dangerous without specifying whether we're talking about bourbon or water.

That key variable seems to matter more than the format.

For example: how do you think a person would feel if they watched 30 minutes straight of "short form video" of kittens playing with each other as opposed to a person who watches 30 minutes of people telling them their political opponents want them to die.

Somehow I think these two scenarios would have very different "mental health" impacts. As with anything, it comes down to what people choose to consume, not how they consume it.

The nature of the content is an important variable to control for in future work, but the primary negative impact appears to be via the devastating effect on human attention.

From the paper: "repeated exposure to highly stimulating, fast-paced content may contribute to habituation, in which users become desensitized to slower, more effortful cognitive tasks such as reading, problem solving, or deep learning. This process may gradually reduce cognitive endurance and weaken the brain’s ability to sustain attention on a single task... potentially reinforcing impulsive engagement patterns and encouraging habitual seeking of instant gratification".

It may be that some media or some alcohol is more toxic than others, but it's still fair to test whether the mode of administration has an independent or enhancing effect.

E.g., crack cocaine is more addictive than nasal, and extended release Adderall is less addictive the immediate-release. So there's good reason to hypothesize that SFV has similar addiction-enhancing effects over long-form, and the article meta-analysis says problems in inhibition and cognition are among the strongest.

wrt choice, the thing about addiction is that while becoming addicted results from a series of choices, being addicted impairs your choice-making executive functions. Addicts use even when they don't like it, and to the exclusion of other things they prefer, and often switch from expensive drugs to cheap ones just to maximize use.

So in the same way that society would prefer to prevent rather than treat legions of fentanyl addicts infecting cities or meth addicts roaming the countryside, society would like to avoid the cognitive decline and productivity loss of a generation lost to scrolling.

I don't think getting addicted to constant serotonin boosts from enjoyable videos is that much better to be honest.

The danger of short form videos is because the form enables the algorithm designer to artificially maximize the reward with minimum effort by the viewer. It doesn't matter whether you watch kitten ones initially. After watching it for a month casually, chances are you would end up watching some addictive videos for hours with little effort. It could be some endless stream of Buddhist monks talking about suffering, if someone likes that kind of thing. It's just designed to be addictive with crazy high reward/effort ratio.