> Heroin is addictive, nicotine is addictive. Light and sound are fundamentally different.

Gambling is also an addiction with a non-chemical basis

Biological addiction is different from psychological addiction, sure. But both are addictive. And personally I believe both cigarettes and Meta products are damaging to a subset of the people consuming them.

Why only a subset? Because not everyone gets cancer from cigarettes. But, like social media, the probability of a negative outcome is too high to ignore.

the underlying cause of addiction is very different. But if there is enough evidence that they're similarly damaging (in magnitude), I think that fundamental difference is irrelevant.

The big tobacco lawsuits hinges on the same things these will:

(1) Did they know they were hurting users? (2) Can the harm be shown.

The big tobacco companies intentionally suppressed studies that showed harm, and promoted their product while knowing that. Facebook appears to have done the same.

Not when they condition children and allow access to them by predators. Reports of bad content, fake, and scam behavior go deliberately rejected and Meta profits from scammers doing their scamming among children. (Read up on Officer Gomez reports of grooming all over Instagram and Facebook and TikTok)

so you draw the line at smell-o-vision?

Is the argument here that social media wasn't designed to be addictive? And no, cigarettes were not designed to cause cancer. It makes no sense to design a product that kills the customer.

Fundamentally different yet with practical outcomes that are close enough. Wildly impressive what we as a species achieved.

The headline talks about parallels. A closer example is gambling if you are concerned with physical properties of a system. Light and sound.

> fundamentally different

fundamentally different how? Because they use your visual cortex to trigger neurons?

> designed

What?