Discussion

@ChrisMayLA6 I’m very torn on this one. As an educator and grandparent I want a ban. As a cynic and a techie I worry about surveillance and corporate abuse of data collection.

@ChrisMayLA6 The metaphor also breaks down just from perspective. Smoking kills about half of all smokers.

Social media may harm people, but at a level that's lower by many orders of magnitude.

The comparison between social media and smoking usually centers on the idea that both can be:
highly addictive,
profitable for companies despite known harms,
normalized culturally before the long-term effects were fully understood,
and especially damaging to young people when use becomes excessive.
Researchers, journalists, parents, and some lawmakers point to several parallels:

@ChrisMayLA6 It’s a terrible metaphor, except in the vague allusion to addiction by design.
As we’ve said so many times, the keys here are:

Governance; local legal control over personally or socially harmful effects such as algorithms, excessive data gathering, or social advertising designed into products.

Moderation; local legal control over acceptable forms of content, compulsory warning labelling of content, via effective proactive moderation (with some thought for mental health of mods)