Letting people figure out cigarettes were bad for them took a very long time, and if social media is another form of addiction why not treat it how we treat other addictive products?

We could assume that this time is different and people, well children and minors specifically, will learn to avoid the addiction rather than banning them like alcohol, cigarettes and gambling.

This time might be different. But it's probably not.

Books, for instance. Some people will read for five hours without pausing, and they can use three or four books every week.

What is your point? I'm afraid I missed the point of your statement.

There was a - very similar - moral panic in the 1700s about young people 'reading excessively', which was blamed for escapism, unhappiness[1] and even increases in suicide rates (see: Werther Effect). The language used was 'reading addiction' - much like todays 'smartphone addiction' or, more modern, AI-related 'illnesses'.

Today, the panic is that kids read too little, or the wrong stuff.

What is and isn't societally desirable changes. The tactic to ban the currently undesirable behaviour persists. Moral panics tell us more about generational dynamics and power structures than the medium itself..

[1] https://www.historytoday.com/archive/medias-first-moral-pani...

What about the health and wellbeing of individuals?

Were there well studied negative health impacts from reading excessively during this very similar scenario?

I'm not a historian so I'm curious to see the parallels because right now it looks like we're talking about two completely different things.

Increased suicide rates were being discussed, and there were doctors claiming they had empirical evidence (worse eyesight, loss of sense of reality, 'melancholy' (aka: depression) ...).

Of course, that was 200 years ago, so our standards of 'rigorous empiricism' can hardly be compared to what they had. But the patterns still are eerily similar.

Also, note how modern diagnostics not only concern the well-being of the media-consuming/delusional individual, but also their environment. Polemically speaking: You can be perfectly happy being weird, if your environment feels negatively affected by you, you technically still are a psychiatrical case and need 'fixing' according to the DSM.

Hell is other people, only the young can defend themselves and their interests less and are easier being picked on.

> Again, every generation thinks that.

> This time might be different. But it's probably not.

And this is an appeal to tradition.

This article[1] from 2024 discusses this the studies on this topic. It seems to me the results are mixed, but conclusions range between social media being neutral to harmful. There is a lot in that article, so it's worth a read.

[1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/728739

When appealing to the authority of academic studies, it's very important to be aware of the replication crisis for studies in the field of Psychology specifically, which is one of the worst offenders. Reproducibility has been found to be as low as 36% [1].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility_Project

That was not an appeal to the authority of academic papers so much as the OP trying to give context for the information that has informed their position.

Your responses have been an appeal to tradition (“every generation thinks that”), and a dismissal of the information because of the reproducibility crisis.

Ie you are arguing that we (humans) struggle with discerning Truth, and therefore we are wrong, and everything is fine.

But taking the negative position is just as epistemologically flawed. Hence the OPs attempt to discuss the best data we can find.