But I feel the exact same about cheeseburgers. Should I be able to sue McDonalds if I let my kid eat 100 of them in one sitting?
Again, I get the danger here, and I don't like TikTok as a whole. I just don't really know where the line is between something that the parent is allowing kids to do (like spending a billion hours on TikTok), versus something they have no control over (like a company badly constructing a car seat, or similar).
The problem with analogies to things like cheeseburgers, gambling, drugs, cigarettes, etc., is:
1. Availability -- you have to go somewhere to acquire/participate in these things*
2. Cost -- you have to have money to spend. That is, it's not something you can consume/participate in for free -- you have to have money to spend.
* Gambling is theoretically freely available via gambling apps. But still comes at a cost.
With social media, anybody can do it for unlimited amounts of time, and for free. All you need is a phone/laptop/desktop with internet access -- which nearly every person on the planet has.
Addiction + Free + Widely available = Destruction
3. Targeting -- even under the (debatable) premise that they are intentionally designed to be addictive, cheeseburgers, drugs and cigarettes do not actively target each addict by optimising their properties to their individual addiction.
If I am addicted to smoking, the tobacco industry does indeed try to keep me hooked, among other things by offering me many flavours and alternatives. However, the cigarettes I personally consume are not constantly adjusting their formula, appearance and packet design specifically to satisfy my tastes and desires.
Even a first step of requiring transparency in the algorithms would quickly shatter this stronghold on people's minds.
If McDonald’s is handing them out for free at the playground, yes.
There are others that touch on personal vs. societal responsibility too and the difficulties with parental/personal moderation and change (Stolen Focus by Johann Hari and Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke off the top of my head).
There is an enormous amount of nuance that goes into answering your questions and addressing your assumptions that HN is probably not a great medium for, if you're serious about understanding the answers.
If RJ Reynolds was handing out free cigarettes to children, even though the parent either consented to this or simply didn't know about it, would you consider RJ Reynolds' responsible for the adverse effects of children smoking?
(This is completely disregarding how practical such a ban would be)
Or give everyone cheap daily GLP-1 pills.
There are other options for addressing social problems besides lawsuits. Other rich places in this world are not nearly as fat as us. I suspect environments also matter for social media addiction. We should investigate why!
Maybe if you had picked gambling or alcohol…
I'm not saying that parents don't have any responsibility, but it's about practicalities. If a teenager can easily buy smokes or alcohol, many will, no matter what the parents say. If you make the goods harder to buy, usage drops. So, shops / software vendors do have some responsibility for societal outcomes.
In a libertarian utopia, anything goes, but kids are... weird in that they often try to push the boundaries of their autonomy without always knowing the risk, and it's in our collective best interest not to let them go too far.
I'd argue most adults are just oversized kids in a trenchcoat
I tried to eat as many cheeseburgers as I could in one sitting (I easily eat double the amount of food of others in one sitting normally), and tapped out at 10 or something, which is impractical and gross, there's a physical limit unless you have certain conditions
If you only go to fast food once a week or less with your kid as a treat, I feel like you could probably exclude soda and fries and tell them to get as many burgers as they want, but they have to eat them all, and it would be more of a lesson than anything lol
It is developed to be as addictive like a drug, but it’s not even fun. Just stupid mind numbing content.gambling does the same thing, and many jurisdictions have outlawed it for minors.
Should you be able to sue a liquor store if they sell your kid a fifth of vodka?
Put another way: If McDonalds sees I eat 5 cheeseburgers a day, at what point do they have to stop serving me for my own health? Do they need to step in at all?
If Facebook knows I'm scrolling 6 hours a day, at what point do they have to stop serving me?
Sure it's a matter of degrees but I don't see a bright line between McDonald's and tiktok. Both want me hooked on their product. Both have harmful aspects. Both have customers they know are over-indulging. Why would only tiktok be liable for that?
Is McDonald's adjusting the flavour and ingredients of each cheeseburger it serves you with the express purpose of encouraging you to order the next one as soon as possible?
That likely depends on how that "something" was publicly marketed to both parents and children based on the company's available information. Our laws historically regulate substances (and their delivery mechanisms) which may lead to addition or are very easy to misuse in a way which leads to permanent harm (see: virtually all mind-altering substances); even nicotine gum is age-restricted like tobacco products. Because nicotine is generally considered an addictive substance, it's regulated, but few reasonable people would argue that parents should be allowed to buy their children nicotine gum so their kids calm down.
Consider how, decades ago, the tobacco companies were implicated in suppressing research demonstrating that tobacco products are harmful to human health. The key here will be if ByteDance has done the same thing.
Also, to play off your point on cheeseburgers: remember the nutritional quality of one cheeseburger versus another will vary. If made with top-quality ingredients (minimally-processed ingredients, organic vegetables, grass-fed beef, etc.), a cheeseburger is actually quite nutritious. However, in a hypothetical situation where a fast-food chain was making false public claims about the composition of their cheeseburgers (e.g., lying about gluten-free buns or organic ingredient status), and someone is harmed as a consequence, the victim might have standing to sue the fast food chain.
https://www.techpolicy.press/is-tiktok-digital-fentanyl/
https://www.foxnews.com/media/tiktok-is-chinas-digital-fenta...
> Certainly, some regard social media generally as addictive, and reckon TikTok is a particularly potent format. Anna Lembke, Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine, chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic, and author of the book Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance In The Age of Abundance, referred to Tiktok as a "potent and addictive digital drug":
> I can’t speak to the surveillance piece mentioned in the article, but I can attest to the addictive nature of TikTok and other similar digital media. The human brain is wired to pay attention to novelty. One of the ways our brain gets us to pay attention to novel stimuli is by releasing dopamine, a reward neurotransmitter, in a part of the brain called the reward pathway. What TikTok does is combine a moving image, already highly reinforcing to the human brain, with the novelty of a very short video clip, to create a potent and addictive digital drug.
Haha, wtf. You don't.
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.
And when the app is developed purposely to make people addict, that’s an issue.
You can’t just blame the user when their chance to have a normal app usage have been rigged.
What is to stop other individuals from filing the same suit and expecting similar outcomes?
Class action suites suffer immensely from bad actors freeloading on the backs of people actually harmed. I have a friend who practices law in the area on some pretty high profile medical cases, it's a chronic problem trying to weed out people who were affected from people who shamelessly want money. Basically people playing victim to steal from actual victims, and even worse, the side doing the weeding is the side who originated the harm.
The law protects companies but rarely binds them, and the law binds citizens but rarely protects them. This is the only recourse, in our land where wealth and power mean more than the rule of law.
That's a mind blowing statistic, and I'm sure this is much more common than we think.
This is why I hope we wake up and realize that social media is going to be the ruin of our society. I hope this trial is the beginning of the end of social media platforms that prey on addictive behaviors.
My jaw is on the floor... Can you provide details of your usage, were you just going through video after video for 12-14 hours or were you involved in content production or something?
I should mention that I was very financially successful due to TikTok. Around Christmas of 2023, my book got over 20M views and shot up to #122 on all Amazon books, until KDP just stopped offering it within a few hours. I wonder how high it would have gone.
But due to that success, I lost both drive and purpose. I had already made it, and it wasn't clear what else I could offer the world. So while I thought about it, I scrolled to pass the time. But that scrolling was endless and addictive. And I never made any progress on figuring out the question of what I'm good for.
Just check out hospitals or elderly shelter thing.
What sort of social changes did you notice after that period of time?
I've never used TikTok, but the techniques they employ sounds seriously addictive.
YouTube I enjoy more, but I still don’t spend much time on it. I mostly go on there looking for something in particular and don’t spend much time scrolling. Their recommendations are terrible and creators chasing the algorithm is making every interesting corner round.
Instagram I like. I love to see updates from friends and family but that runs out quickly so I don’t end up spending much time there.
Facebook is good for their marketplace when I’m looking to buy something or give something away.
Mastodon is boring, X is offensive, posts on BlueSky and Threads feel fake and performative. LinkedIn is full of journeys and learnings and I’m not interested in either.
HN is the only social media site I visit with any kind of frequency.
Oh shoot, we were talking about TikTok right?
Nobody ever saw it as a bad thing though, many people even encouraged me. Looking back at it 90% what I read was absolutely useless besides some novelty and being useful for quizzes.
Wonder what I could've done with all the time I lost, probably changed my behaviour in general. Can't imagine how much tiktok changes these kids.
“IG is a drug”: Internal messages may doom Meta at social media addiction trial
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/tiktok-settles-h...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/tiktok-settles-h...
I wonder if the settlement amounts will ever become public. The Big Tobacco comparison keeps coming up, but those settlements were massive and included ongoing payments. Hard to imagine social media companies agreeing to anything similar without admitting some level of harm.
As a parent of two kids (8 and 6), I think about this constantly. We limit screen time pretty aggressively, but it's getting harder as they get older. The "attention-grabbing design" part isn't some conspiracy theory. These apps are explicitly optimized for engagement. The question is whether that optimization crosses a legal line.
Curious how the trial plays out with Zuckerberg on the stand.
Can't really be without a phone when they need to meet up with friends either. Completely going against smartphones and screens could end up isolating them.
Curious into what kind of example you as a parent are setting in limiting screen time for yourself. For me, it's easy as I'm an old fart that has had a longer time without devices than with one while also not participating in the socials. We now have parents that have had a device for the majority of their life having kids that will never know a time without devices. So this is an honest bit of curiosity at the risk of sounding judgemental.
If I log off Facebook and it starts spamming me with fake notifications, it's addictive in a way that's more than just "Facebook provides a great service! I'm on it all the time! It's so addictive! :)"
If feeds were chronological and they didn't blatantly lie to your face, or you got messages on time (they like not sending it to you by email) it wouldn't be addictive in a lab rat style
(This is Facebook, not TikTok, but still. And yes, I know TT tries to be addictive on purpose)
TikTok blocks Epstein mentions and anti-Trump videos, users claim. Alleged censorship comes after investors loyal to Trump take over social media platform.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/tiktok-epstein-trump-cens...
>TikTok users in the US have reported being unable to write the word ‘Epstein’ in messages amid accusations that the social media platform is suppressing content critical of President Donald Trump.
>The issues come less than a week after TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, was forced to divest a majority stake in its US operations to a group of investors loyal to President Trump, who was a close associate with the late convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
I don't think the recent censorship of US American policy is a coincidence when you consider these factors.
Trump did not enforce the ban.
As soon as TikTok changed ownership last week, censorship of posts that are not in line with the Trump regime began happening.