Reason Roundup

Social Media Is Not Tobacco

Plus: Hollywood is over, the war in Iran is not, Democrats are fighting about affordability, and more...

Peter Suderman | 3.31.2026 9:30 AM

Share on FacebookShare on XShare on RedditShare by emailPrint friendly versionCopy page URL Add Reason to Google

Media Contact & Reprint Requests

(Photo: Dreamstime)

Social media addiction? One of the refrains you hear from social media critics is that it's effectively a kind of digital tobacco—unsafe, addictive, and intentionally marketed to children, despite executives knowing the harms.

In broad strokes, that was the idea behind the $375 million verdict against Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, in New Mexico last week. 

The Reason Roundup Newsletter by Liz Wolfe Liz and Reason help you make sense of the day's news every morning.

Δ

LinkedIn

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Email(Required)

SUBSCRIBE

On the new episode of The Reason Roundtable, Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Matt Welch, and I talk about why this metaphor fails, why these judgments are worrying for free speech, and why we seem to be entering a new era of social media prohibition. 

Tobacco is a chemical that is ingested into the body with specific, measurable, physical effects.

Social media is a delivery system for speech—speech that will be different for every user, and speech that is protected by the First Amendment because, well, it's speech. 

The lawyers arguing the case against Meta have said they are not attacking speech. Instead, they are arguing that it's a defective product with dangerous design features, like autoplay video and infinite scroll.

But those features wouldn't be compelling without the content—which is to say without the speech—they push to users. An infinite scroll of grass growing probably wouldn't be very engaging. 

So much of this argument reminds me of the debates about Hollywood and media from my youth. In the 1980s, the political class was obsessed with profane rock and rap lyrics, which were coarsening the culture and harming youths. In the 1990s, there were congressional hearings about the dangers posed to children by violent video games like Mortal Kombat and edgy movies like Reservoir Dogs. Today, these political campaigns seem transparently ridiculous; the Mortal Kombat series is still around, but it's practically camp, with "Friendship" kills along with the old gory fatalities. And Reservoir Dogs director........

© Reason.com