My granddaughter began scrolling on a cellphone when she was around 2 years old, her index finger repeatedly swiping across its face as if she were already a teenager. 

Some of the 18-year-olds in my classes at Berkeley seem to suffer withdrawal symptoms when I ask them to put away their phones.

I see young people in restaurants sitting with other young people, none saying a word to each other as they lose themselves in their devices. 

Are they addicted? Yes, if you define addiction as getting such a dopamine rush that they feel compelled to use their cellphones for hours at a time. 

How similar is this to a nicotine addiction? And — as was a central question 30 years ago when Big Tobacco was being sued — is Big Tech intentionally designing its product to hook young people? 

The answer appears to be that the addictions are quite similar, and Big Tech is just as culpable as Big Tobacco. 

On Wednesday, in California, a young woman prevailed in a lawsuit against social media giants Meta Platforms and Google’s YouTube, in which she accused them of designing their apps to be as addictive and harmful to adolescents as cigarettes. Jurors found the tech companies to be negligent in having failed to provide adequate warnings about the potential dangers of their products.

What seemed to persuade the jury were features that Meta and YouTube had built into their software like infinite scroll, algorithmic recommendations, and autoplay videos — designed to........

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