I absolutely do not know they're addictive.

I've lived through this entire story before in the video game wars. People said exactly the same things with exactly the same urgency about Mortal Kombat - what kind of sick society do we live in, where greedy corporations sell you the experience of shooting people and ripping their heads off? Perhaps we have to let adults buy these "murder simulators", but only a disturbed, evil person could possibly argue for letting kids do it.

If that sounds crazy to you, the moral panic over social media will sound just as crazy in a decade or two.

Having lived through the exact same hysteria, this is a totally different argument being made. This isn't about the morality of a genre of violent YouTube videos or some other tawdry content. It's not the satanic panic or about explicit lyrical content. This is about the safety of designing systems that are psychologically manipulative for the purpose of extracting as much advertising budget possible from clients. If Mortal Kombat was free to play and learned to reprogram itself to keep the child playing for as possible with no ethical bounds. Even if it had to resort to calling the child names or making them feel like playing was only way they'd find some self worth... then we'd be talking about the same thing.

From my perspective, this will sound crazy in a decade or two but more like how harmful smoking is and how ridiculous it is we didn't see it soon.

I'm genuinely curious how one can look at someone using an app like TikTok and conclude that's not addictive. It's optimised in every way to engage people in behaviours that look like outright addiction.

Anyway, sometimes 'panic' is justified. Sports betting has been a total disaster, for example.

Having lived through those panics, fought against them, and then raised the alarm on Lootboxes and FarmVille the day they came out - these are not the same things.

This isn’t a moral panic.

Mortal Kombat did not result in changed behavior in its users. As I recall, The best study on video games only showed that there was some change in behavior for a short time after playing a game, and then children reverted to their baseline.

On the other hand, social media has not survived that scrutiny, with multiple studies show a causal link between anorexia, depression, anxiety, addictive design and social media.

People defended cigarettes too back in the day, and it took years for people to stop smoking cigarettes in public.

Tobacco was not a moral panic.

Europeans are shocked by the portion sizes in America. But they feel normal in the US. Frogs often don't know they are being boiled.

It’s funny since I worked extensively in both industries and the number of absolutely addicted boomers on farmville and match3 canvas and mobile games throwing their life savings and time away was totally competitive with Vegas

Interesting argument, but I think statistics about video game addiction & mental problems etc was never really serious, and with social media it is.

A big difference between social media and the video games of yore was that social media is predicated on increasing your engagement — companies are spending billions to keep you engaging as much as possible and their profits are linearly tied to your engagement. With MK, the game publisher wants you to enjoy it enough to buy their next game, but their profits remain the same whether you play it once a month or once a day.

Except the number of people who are on social media daily is exponentially greater than those who played Mortal Kombat. You couldn’t play MK while on a dinner date; except for a few people, it didn’t replace a large fraction of social interaction. It’s not at all comparable. I strongly disagree that it’s a “moral panic”.