There are analogues to social media use in every generation. They are problems we’re already familiar with, they’ve just been amplified.

I highly doubt we’ll ever see anything even remotely akin to the risks of tobacco. Tobacco is a medical nightmare. The problems that would likely be caused by social media can be treated and reversed. It’s night and day between the two.

As the commenter stated, it’s an unpopular opinion that social media is as bad as cigarettes.

Tldr: -Problem were here before, but not on such a massive scale -No safe place -Parents have way less influence on their children -Younger people are influenced way more by external factors, than more mature people

How can you be so sure, that we will never see anything as bad / risky as tabacco? Sure, we do know a lot about the physical consequences to our body, but there is so much more to it than just that. Getting cancer, any other illness or damage to our body sucks, however these are consequences we do know exist. Do you consider, that you probably will hang out with different kind of people and as a consequent develop differently? Do you consider the addiction, not beeing able to concentrate for a long time without a breake, because you are longing for the next cigarette? Do u consider ...

This list could go on and on and each of these aspects gets worse the younger you are. Of course I can't tell if these example truely have a big negativ effect on you, but I am sure, that these and other factors shape you as a person.

Now we look at social media, which tend to have not that many physical consequences for your body. However there are so many more psychological factors shaping your brain, behavior and habits. Addiction, false role model, always having social pressure just to name a few. You are rigth, these factors did exist before, but in a much smaller scale. Furthermore a parent can only raise and help his children grow and develop as much, as they are spending time together. Nowadays kids spend a lot of time on the internet / social media, which it used to spend with other children playing and while playing with other kids, learning how to behave in a society. Of course we didn't always do as our parent told us, but we never even come close to the f*cked up stuff we see on the internet daily. We never had a million eyes watching every step and be judged by them. Home was a safe place.

I spent quit a lot of time on this comment, way too much to be honest, but what I am trying to say is:

-These 'normal' factors are on a massive scale and the impact they have, direct or indirect, shouldn't be taken lightly -There is no safe place anymore. If you are not on social media, you are 'different' / 'weird' -Parents have way less influence on the development of their children

There’s no likely avenue through which social media leads to death. It’s that simple. Tobacco products kill a lot of people.

The problems you list are significant and bad, but many of them will improve as society as a whole learns to parent in an age of social media. Not just this, but as people grow to see how negatively social media affects you, the public attitudes toward it will change and adapt. At no point in this process is social media going to be killing people.

I’m not saying that social media doesn’t cause the very negative things you outline. I’m just pointing out that it’s not as bad as smoking.

That being said, I’m all for legislation that stops young people from using social media. I think it would be totally reasonable to make it illegal under a certain age.

Social media and cyberbullying leads to suicide and has and does kill people. This is particularly bad when those alt-f4’ing their life are adolescents and not post-midlife when smoking will kill.

It seems like it’s too early to tell how severe the second and third order effects of social media are on one’s own well-being and the well-being of society.

My language allowed for the acknowledgement of few and far between cases of suicide. It’s not a fair comparison to smoking deaths. Social media suicides get a lot of attention because, like you said, adolescent suicide is particularly sad. The numbers, however, are completely different orders of magnitudes; deaths by social media are insignificant when compared to smoking.