No one is ‘addicted’ to Instagram or YouTube

I have little sympathy for the multibillion-dollar tech companies, Meta and Google, which were this week forced to pay out a combined $6million in damages to a 20-year-old woman. But I have even less sympathy for the notion of ‘social-media addiction’ that led to this extraordinary payout.

Kaley (whose full name has not been made public) successfully persuaded a Los Angeles jury that she became addicted to Google-owned YouTube at age six and to Meta-owned Instagram at nine. She claimed that both addictions had deleterious effects on her wellbeing, causing her to become depressed and to self-harm by the age of 10.

These claims should have been treated with far more scepticism. Any testimony based on the recollections of an adult from when they were a child should be open to question. What’s more, the drawing of a causal connection between Kaley’s social-media consumption, which began 14 years ago, and her subsequent psychological problems ignores all the many contingent factors that might also have influenced her, such as her family life and a variety of possible bad experiences.

What I find particularly astounding is the reluctance to ask the question of why a six-year-old was ever allowed to watch so much YouTube or to scroll endlessly on her phone. Where were her parents? It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the real problem revealed by this unhappy case is the role played by the absence of adult responsibility.

The real issue raised by this case is the aversion to responsibility that now prevails in the West. This is aided by the commanding influence of the narrative of ‘addiction’. We live in a world where bad habits, as they used to be called, have been rebranded, medicalised and diagnosed as addictions. I still remember the days when this psychological label was only used in reference to alcohol and drugs. Since the 1980s, however, addiction has undergone the process of concept creep. From sex addiction to shopping addiction, just about every form of obsessive behaviour has been pathologised as a deep psychological problem that deprives people of autonomy. It is no longer only heavy smokers, alcoholics or drug abusers who are deemed ‘addicts’ now – everyone from compulsive phone users to obsessive cake eaters fits the expanded definition.

The flourishing of the addiction industry is partly driven by individuals’ demand to be relieved of responsibility for their bad behaviour. It is also fuelled by the Therapy Industrial Complex, which aims to turn people into vulnerable patients.

No doubt there are many troubling aspects of social-media usage among young people. And no doubt the social-media platforms have little interest in playing the role of digital nannies to their young customers. But to diagnose this problem as ‘social-media addiction’ is to mystify and also to medicalise what is, in effect, a social and cultural challenge facing society.

The addiction that I really worry about is society’s addiction to addiction. Through the years, terms connoting some sort of addiction have proliferated, including workaholism, shopaholism, porn addiction, compulsive helping, exercise addiction, tanning addiction and chocolate addiction. People who pray too much can be diagnosed as suffering from addiction to religion. Some of them may have to be weaned off the ‘God Drug’. And if you are too focussed on another person and feel too much love for him or her, you may well be suffering from addiction to love.

Professionals promoting the ever-growing number of addictions insist that they are in the business of providing treatment and help. However, by medicalising every dimension of human behaviour, they turn us into patients and clients. Take the fashionable label of an ‘addictive personality’. It encourages people to acquiesce to their worst instincts. Addicts are portrayed as victims of circumstances beyond their control: they are literally counselled to accept powerlessness as the defining feature of their existence. Sexaholics Anonymous mimics the 12-step approach of Alcoholics Anonymous. The first step that a sex addict takes on the road to sexual sobriety is to admit that ‘we were powerless over lust’.

The promotion of the myth of human powerlessness has fostered a climate where addiction has become not only normalised, but also actively sought out as a diagnosis. This status of dependence is continually reinforced by constant exhortation to seek professional support. As a result, a new culture of dependency is constantly promoted and upheld.

The narrative of addiction is so powerful that it serves as the medium through which people interpret their existential problems. Individuals like Kaley have become socialised to make sense of their predicaments through the prism of addiction. No doubt she now genuinely believes that, at the age of six, she became a YouTube addict. And that this is all YouTube’s fault.

We must resist the narrative of ‘addiction’ and the sense of dependency it creates. Human beings are independent moral agents. And if we are not, then everything is permitted, because we cannot be responsible for anything. Is that really the world we want to live in?

Frank Furedi is the executive director of the think-tank, MCC-Brussels.