Addressing the Root Causes of Social Media Addiction

Addiction Economy Thought for Today - Fingers crossed for this letter to the Financial Times in response to the new study on social media addiction and anxiety in young people!

To the Letters page editor

It was depressing see further evidence of the ‘linear relationship between higher rates of anxiety and depression and time spent networking on social media sites’ in the new BrainWaves study lead by the University of Oxford in your article (Teenage social media use strongly linked to anxiety and depression, Laura Hughes Amy Borrett 14 October).

However, we were dismayed that the solutions proposed focused only on modifying the behaviour of the young people themselves through ‘lesson plans on topics such as coping with change, sleep, critical thinking and stress’. Urgent action is needed to address the root cause of this problem, which is the companies who use sophisticated ‘addiction maximising techniques’ in their product design to deliberately undermine people’s ability to control their use of these products - aka to addict them.

It came as no surprise to us that lack of ‘“agency” - defined as a feeling of control over actions and their consequences’ was correlated with anxiety and depression; it is also a feature of the mental health issues arising from the use of other products designed to addict - such as cigarettes, vapes, ultra-processed food, alcohol, gambling, and computer games

As Professor Gallacher reports, mental health “affects many, tends to start young, and recur throughout life.” Given that an addicted customer is a loyal customer, it is no coincidence that these other Addiction Economy industries, like Social Media, also target those who will give them the greatest long term profitability - the young. Creating, for example, nutrition-less cereals featuring cartoon characters, pastel-coloured vapes named after sweets, fruity alcopops (in resurgence) and computer games which are targeted at even tiny children.

We were very encouraged to see that the study concludes “wellbeing and flourishing are also strongly correlated to high agency.” Regulating these addictive products which rob us of our agency is the real ‘missing piece’ on both mental and physical health. The new government must act immediately to prevent addiction maximising product design techniques, inescapable availability of products, predatory advertising and corporate lobbying if they want to enhance the health and wellbeing of us all, but particularly the young.

Hilary Sutcliffe and Joe Woof
The Addiction Economy Initiative

Alison Taylor - would love an introduction to your colleague Jonathan Haidt on this particular angle of our Addiction Economy work if you think it might be of interest to him?