Saying that addiction to a website isn't possible is unfounded.
People get addicted to online gambling. That's just "a website on a screen." It's clearly possible and it clearly happens.
I am not pro-corporate as some are accusing me. I've never even had a facebook, twitter, or the like account in my life. I think these are terrible services and platforms. But it is even more dangerous to apply a label like "addiction" to them because then politicians think they can treat them like drugs... and we know how dangerous that response is.
The second, more important, is that even if we rename it properly to "internet disorder" there's still not significant evidence for making it a behavioral disorder. This is backed up by the lack of inclusion in the DSMV updates and ICD10 updates or 11 just released. People have certainly tried to have these things included: their income depended upon it. But the science rejected it.
You could also make the same correlations between autism spectrum disorder and the rise of popular (ie, non-usenet, irc, etc) social networks online. But it obviously wasn't caused by it. It was caused by a better identification of the phenotype and more accessible treatment. I think the claimed and unverifiable "increase in bad mental health/etc/etc in teens" is much of the same.
It's not in the Bible either. So clearly this isn't a real problem.
Why are we trusting acceptance by a community of gatekeeping charlatans as the final say on whether or not a problem exists? Meta hires psychologists to engineer these very exploitative patterns they deny the existence of. They can't put that in the DSM-V. People would take notice that they're a rehab clinic in the business of selling heroin.
my dude, teens leaving school are crossing the street without even looking up, because they're scrolling insta. Ok so they are dumb teens. What about the crossing guard lady ? She is paid money by the school board to monitor the crossing lane so the cars don't hit the teens. Now, the crossing guard also doesn't look up, because she is scrolling insta too. How do you think all this ends ?
You're incorrectly making assumptions about that wording. They're all disorders now. E.g. a heroin addiction is officially "opioid use disorder" in the DSM. It's probably part of some initiative to be more inclusive or avoid the accusatory nature of the word addiction.
More than that, you're interpreting in the wrong direction. Gambling disorder and substance use disorders were both moved into the same chapter of the DSM-V ("Substance-related and addictive disorders"), reflecting ongoing evidence that gambling disorder triggers reward pathways in the brain the same way that drugs do.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40429-014-0027-6 if you want more info on the history of categorizing gambling and other addictive but non-substance-abuse disorders.
>reflecting ongoing evidence that gambling disorder triggers reward pathways in the brain the same way that drugs do.
Yes, people find things that are intermittently rewarding to have more incentive salience eventually. But gambling with random operant condition is not hijacking those neuronal populations responsible for reward prediction (like the dopaminergic neurons of the ventral tegmental area) and activating them in the absence of reward. It is merely reacting appropriately to actual reward as encoded by activation of the glutamergic populations of the shell of the nucleus accumbens (at least). That's a huge difference... though apparently not big enough to stem the political and social tides.