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RICK MacLEAN: Sure, social media is addictive. That’s by design

Consider Tim Kendall. If anyone should have known better, it was him.

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He was, after all, so good at his job helping social media giant Facebook make money he spent years making it happen. And if you haven’t looked at the estimated value of Facebook recently, don’t. It’s depressing.

OK, here it is. Now part of Meta – which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp – Facebook is pulling in about $135 billion U.S. a year and it’s worth an estimated $1.5 trillion. That’s $1,500 billion.

So it can hire good people. And Kendall was one of them.

Yet, he was as addicted to his social media as any 15-year-old on P.E.I. who might soon be struggling to cope with a federal law restricting access to their favourite doorway into the online world.

“I was coming home, and I couldn’t get off my phone once I got home, despite having two young kids who needed my love and attention,” Kendall said on the documentary The Social Dilemma, a 2020 look at social media.

“I was in the pantry typing away on an e-mail or sometimes looking at Pinterest. I thought, ‘God, this is classic irony. I am going to work during the day and building something that then I am falling prey........

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