Does social media really addict us?

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are running content very harmful to children. So said a jury in New Mexico that just slapped their owner, Meta, with a $375 million fine. The state accused the company of spreading pornographic images and helping adults contact vulnerable children. Meta faces thousands of suits, but in a landmark case decided in California on Wednesday, the company was told to pay 20-year-old plaintiff Kaley G.M. $4.2 million in combined compensatory and punitive damages. Kaley blamed its products on a variety of mental health issues, including depression and dangerous distress over her body shape. All the above charges ring true, but large remedies for reducing the hazards through legislation and suits seem almost impossible. The web is a lot bigger than even the media giants. There will always be operators spreading the nastiest content, and tech-savvy users, including adolescents, will be able to find it. Meanwhile, a $375 million fine is a rounding error to Meta, whose revenues in one recent quarter totaled 160 times that amount. The company has just unveiled a new stock-option plan that could hand dollars in the hundreds of millions to top executives if they hit steep growth targets. With that kind of incentive, how picky do you think Meta execs will be about content drawing viewers? What makes it so hard to protect young people from damaging content is social media's addictive pull. The platforms observe what keeps you engaged and keep sending you more of the same type of content. That's why my feeds are full of videos showing dogs being rescued. For teen girls worried about their looks, as they've always been, the platforms' barrage of content portraying unusually perfect young bodies exposes them to hurtful comparisons. Some pictures aren't even of real females. And some that are have been very much doctored. Such content promotes obsessive media use among teens, according to a recent study by JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association). The messages fuel humiliation and anxiety and can trigger eating disorders. It's not easy for parents to rein in children's social media use in a society swimming in technology and those cool delivery systems, but they can try. I'm always surprised to see family dinners at restaurants where children are engaged with tablets, off in their own world. Many otherwise good caregivers encourage use of these devices to keep children occupied and out of their way. The best schools are banning tablets and phones in their classrooms. They often store the devices on the way in and give them back as the students leave. Some parents make this harder by demanding the ability to contact their children at any time in the day. The schools tell them that the main office can be called in the event of an emergency and the student taken out of class. Bear in mind that for centuries, parents didn't have 24/7 access to children at school or out at play. Earlier generations somehow survived. The most manipulative content can be hard on adolescents, but how addictive is it really? I changed some unhealthy habits without going cold turkey. For a while, I was hooked on rage-bait. That's content designed to make me angry. Rage-bait is the gateway to doomscrolling, which is the obsessive search for negative posts. I couldn't count the hours I'll never get back scrolling through aggravating posts, many of which were basically fiction disguised as real news or real news designed to distort the reality, which can be worse. But YouTube, owned by Google, has wonderful videos on history, good things to read and how to do stuff. Sure, there's mind rot, but you generally must click to get it. As for the less noble platforms, I still follow the dog rescues. Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com.