A Los Angeles jury recently found Meta and Google liable in a landmark case that described platforms like Instagram and YouTube as deliberately engineered to be addictive to children. “Addictive” is a powerful word. But what does it mean here — that using these platforms produces the same kind of physiological dependence associated with substance use? Not necessarily. More often, what critics label “addiction” is intense, habitual engagement — closer to enthusiasm or strong preference than to clinical addiction.
Separating dependency from addiction matters. Over recent decades social scientists have preferred the term dependency for behaviors such as heavy shopping, sex, gambling or social media use. Dependency implies reliance that can often be ended by will — however difficult that may be. Addiction, in its medical sense, points to repeated exposure producing physiological changes that undermine volition. In true addiction, willpower is often insufficient: the body has adapted in ways that make cessation profoundly difficult, as with opioid dependence.
Yet the distinction between dependency and addiction has blurred in everyday language. Addiction has migrated from a clinical category to a catch-all phrase for anything repeated with gusto: we call ourselves addicted to chocolate, to shopping, to screens. That linguistic drift has consequences. Terms that once signified physiological dependence now describe patterns of voluntary behavior incentivized by design. Conflating the two risks mischaracterizing ordinary human choices as medical pathologies.
The expansion of medical authority into everyday life — medicalization — helps explain this shift. As William C. Cockerham and earlier critics such as Ivan Illich and Thomas Szasz argued, medicine does not merely record biological facts; it shapes what we treat as illness. Medicalization has brought important gains: alcohol use disorder, depression and anxiety are now socially legible conditions, reducing stigma and enabling treatment. But as medicine’s reach has extended, behaviors once considered normal or morally charged have been reclassified as medical problems. The harder medicine works to render suffering visible and treatable, the more tempting it is to apply the same model to behaviors that lack the same biophysical basis.
Gambling is a useful comparator. Historically seen as risky recreation, gambling now has a recognized disorder category. But many gamblers describe their behavior not as compulsive in the medical sense but as strategic, anticipatory and rewarding. They continue despite losses because the activity supplies excitement, identity and social meaning. The diagnosis of “problem gambler” often follows ruinous outcomes; when gambling yields wins it attracts admiration. That suggests the boundary between pathology and normality is often retrospective and contextual: behavior becomes a disorder when outcomes are judged unacceptable.
Social media fits a similar pattern. Platforms are intentionally designed to capture attention, with cycles of anticipation and intermittent reward — likes, comments, new posts — that reinforce return visits. That design produces strong reinforcement, but reinforcement is not proof of addiction; it is evidence of effective incentive architecture. Users return because the experience is satisfying and because participation is embedded in their social world. To disengage is not just an act of will; it often means withdrawing from networks of friendship, information and recognition.
Importantly, “social media addiction” is not a formal diagnosis in major psychiatric classifications such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR). That absence is revealing: when courts, policymakers or media speak of addiction, they often invoke clinical language that lacks a recognized clinical counterpart. Labeling a social phenomenon as an addiction imports assumptions about compulsion, physiological dependence and impaired agency that may not hold.
Young people’s voices are frequently absent from these debates. Parents, clinicians, policymakers and courts pronounce judgment about the harms of social media with little attention to how young users themselves experience it. Research — including large-scale studies and ethnographies — shows that many young people are reflexive about their online lives, aware of risks and capable of weighing rewards. For most, online engagement is integral to communication and identity, not a pathology to be excised.
This is not to deny online harm. Some users, particularly those who are vulnerable, may experience anxiety, distress or lowered wellbeing connected to their online interactions. Those harms warrant attention, support and, where appropriate, regulation. But harm alone does not equate to a medical disorder. The critical question is whether problematic patterns of online behavior are best understood as individual disorders or as features of a social world in which digital interaction is ubiquitous and structurally encouraged.
Framing the problem in clinical terms has effects beyond diagnosis. If courts and regulators accept the language of addiction, responsibility shifts: blame moves from users to platforms and potentially to government. That shift can be justified when platforms deliberately design mechanisms that exploit vulnerabilities. But it also risks pathologizing routine social practices and redirecting attention away from social, educational and structural responses that could empower users.
In short, intense and repeated social media use is often better described as dependency reinforced by design and social need rather than as clinical addiction. Recognizing that distinction matters for how we respond: medical interventions, public health measures, platform regulation and education each have different roles. Over-medicalizing social conduct risks obscuring those options and narrowing how we understand both harm and responsibility.
[Ellis Cashmore is a co-author of Screen Society.]
[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]
The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
