And are their laws about how much I can go gamble at the casino right now or how much I can go buy at a liquor store and drink tonight?

Pretty sure too much gambling and too much alcohol is worse than watching too many short videos. So how can we say that spending time on figuring out how to block people from watching too many short videos is a better use of our time and resources than limiting gambling and drinking.

And yet we're talking about a case against social media companies and not a case against casinos or distillers.

Huh, that's exactly the solution to addiction? Step 1 is always changing your behaviour patterns to break out of habits and avoid things that draw you into it.

Make your bedroom a phone-free zone, charge it in the living room overnight, use the built in parenting and screentime controls that every modern phone OS has, don't let your kids stare at the screen all day. Etc.

This isn't rocket science. Self control is one of the most important things you need to learn. It sucks and it's hard but it's basic life stuff.

The only difference with social media addiction vs drugs/gambling is that it's not socially ostracized like other addictions so people ignore it.

This is the lie that keeps people addicted. Plenty of people quit their very real addictions every day. If you imagine you're helplessly addicted, you will remain addicted.

re adults it does fall to individual responsibility , re kids we can partially blame parents for not taking care of their kids properly , overall the enemy of our attention has quadrillions of dollars which is fairly difficult to fight against

This stuff is still unclear to me. The addictive drugs, ones that punish a quitter chemically, are not mysterious, but gambling addiction certainly is. "Dopamine" won't work as an explanation - for instance I was once hooked on building a wooden table, which sucked up two months of my free time and lots of money, and damaged my thumbs, and no doubt I was driven by the dopamine rush of learning through the repetitive process of chiseling. But gambling is assumed to be a glitch, not a wholesome obsession. In what way does it differ? The addiction is very old, I'm sure there are accounts from the 1700s, and it doesn't even require a house to reel the gambler in - it could all be about informal games and wagers, still leading to huge debts. It's tempting to blame it on dumb ideas about luck and fate, but the dumb ideas involved could be varied and complex.

That's similar to dumb ideas involving social pressure. When people have a tendency to be dumb about a thing we use the law to restrict the thing, apparently. But this involves, in effect, an authoritative declaration of "that's dumb" by law. I feel personally threatened, then, in activities such as my woodwork, which might have been an equally dumb obsession! I know nobody's at all likely to regulate woodwork, but that's only because it's relatively unpopular. I could imagine a parallel universe where woodwork (portable somehow) becomes a trend that makes a young person feel socially relevant, and then it gets regulated. I think I disapprove of this interference with people's dumb notions.