Social Media Addiction in the Courts

The two American rulings (by California and New Mexico courts) that sentenced web giants Meta and Google to million-dollar fines for accusing them of using social media platforms to create addiction, especially among the very young, and to steal private and personal data, open a new chapter in our relationship with technology.

Once again, America is leading the way, through its judiciary, in cornering powerful forces that have a significant impact on human health and lifestyles. What we saw with tobacco and pesticides is repeating itself, and there are already thousands of lawsuits in 30 US states where web platforms are being held accountable for crimes that challenge their business model. Just as in the case of tobacco, what's at stake here is the ability of social media—all social media—to create dependence and thus become harmful. In the 1990s, when giants like Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds were in the dock, the accusation was that cigarettes weren't simply dangerous, but were designed to create addiction. This is precisely what social media is now criticizing.

The long wave of American justice, and we must say this, acts as a sort of substitute for the political vacuum that for years, in America as in the rest of the world, has been unable (and unwilling) to stem the excessive power of tech-finance, whose tycoons are the true "masters of the world." If it was scandalous to see them lined up in single file, kissing Donald Trump's hand when he took office in the White House as a sign of submission, with the obvious compensation of not being disturbed, we cannot forget that during Barack Obama's presidency, the top managers of high-tech companies were at the center of the sliding doors: they entered and exited the halls of political power in a daily and obvious conflict of interests. What politics has failed to do, namely to curb the excessive power of web platforms and create the conditions to reduce their power as tools that create dependency, is now being attempted by the court judges..

Meanwhile, scientific research continues to reiterate two fundamental facts. This addiction, controlled by algorithms, is more harmful than alcohol and drugs for certain types of pathologies. Since 2012, the year the social media boom began, cases of severe depression among young people in the United States have increased by 150 percent, and suicides by 91 percent. What else must we wait for to certify the harms of social media addiction? The second thing is that the toxic dependence created by the platforms is inherent in their operation: they can't do without it. When Mark Elliot Zuckerberg shows up in a Los Angeles courtroom with ashes on his head and says , he lies knowingly. The truth is that he, like his colleagues, can't do anything concrete to stop the addiction, as it would put their revenues and profits at risk. On the other hand, we understand what a fine fellow the genius is. Zuckerberg, already known in Silicon Valley as "the privacy killer."

The avalanche of sentences that will arrive from the American courts, with a flurry of class action In favor of the prosecution, it will help push for restrictive legislation on the starting age for using social media, and it is very likely that the format introduced in Australia (with a ban up to the age of 16) will be destined to spread to many other countries, although these limits are not easy to establish without real cooperation from the platforms.

Rulings, laws, bans: can we really delude ourselves into thinking we can solve, or at least address, the problem of social media addiction through judicial and legislative channels, which are certainly useful? An answer to this question comes from a couple of data: a fifth of the adult population in Italy considers itself dependent on InternetAnd 63 percent have to turn on their smartphone as soon as they wake up to check their messages on social media. We can therefore conclude that Parents, in terms of addiction, they are worse off than their children.

And here we come to the heart of the problem. Rulings and laws can help us—once again, the smoking precedent is instructive—but they require a solid foundation that affects our lifestyles and our relationship with technology in general. We can't ask our children and grandchildren to do what we ourselves can't: free ourselves from this addiction. Significant in this regard are the images of families sitting on the train or at a restaurant, glued to their smartphones, browsing social media. Who is more addicted? The father, the mother, or the children? Smartphones and social media, because we're talking about close synonyms, need to be used with maximum freedom, but also with a healthy dose of contagious responsibility. And they require a new etiquette, which also includes a series of moments (certain hours of the day) and places (for example, the set table) that are completely reserved. digital free. The family plays a fundamental role in this paradigm shift, and everyone has a role to play. Another key element in this social detox is school. After the years of technological intoxication, when we wanted to eliminate everything (paper, books, notebooks) to focus on the use of technological devices, a perhaps overly rigid retreat has been triggered, with a series of prohibitions: but wouldn't it be better if schools, within civic education programs, Do you explain to students how they can win their tug-of-war with technology, and become masters, not slaves to smartphones and social media?

The game we're playing with social media addiction is vital and wide open: it's not true that we should consider it lost; there's plenty of time to recover. We just need to be clear-headed enough not to think we can win it by dint of laws or court rulings.

Social media addiction isn't defeated in court.

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