Social media is not as dangerous as smoking.
From the former UK Health Secretary, Wes Streeting:
This line of attack against American technology companies has been in the works for years. American writer Jonathan Haidt’s book, the Anxious Generation, blames social media and mobile telephony for purported declines in youth mental health; it is essentially an activist’s bible for those who want to disconnect young people from the Internet.
Those ideas were, in turn, adopted by the UK’s leading censorship activist, and influential life peer in the House of Lords, Beeban Kidron, largely wholesale. Kidron is widely regarded as the architect of the UK’s continuing “online safety” regime, and has been pushing the idea that web apps are the digital equivalent to addictive drugs in the media for most of this year:
It is wildly intellectually dishonest to equate publishing platforms with highly addictive chemical compounds.
There is a scientific consensus that smoking will, quite literally, kill you. That consensus is backed by decades of nearly irrefutable scientific evidence. Engaging in smoking increases the probability of debilitating and painful illness and eventual death. There is a direct line of causation between smoking and life-altering, or life-ending, disease. Smoking gives you cancer, emphysema, and heart disease.
Social media, by contrast, allows you to talk to other human beings. It is also, quite clearly, not addictive, at least not in the sense that a cigarette is. Using TikTok is essentially the same thing as reading or watching television – activities which themselves might lead to psychological dependencies of a kind (see: bibliomania or theorized-but-controversial television addiction), but lack the addictive qualities of drugs and generally appear in conjunction with other psychological problems.
Most humans can use highly engaging entertainment delivered via a screen with few if any biomedical ill-effects (except perhaps for the side effects associated with being sedentary instead of active).
We have done so, by our billions, for nearly a century.
The science says that anti-tech activists describing social media as addictive are possibly doing more harm to Internet users than social media addiction itself.
And it’s not just me saying this. A peer-reviewed study by Anderson and Wood published in Scientific Reports (Nature’s open-access journal) in November 2025 found that, while 18% of Instagram users self-reported being addicted to the app, only 2% met the clinical criteria for addiction risk on the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale, the standard instrument clinicians use to diagnose addiction.
The authors found that this nine-fold gap between perceived and clinical addiction is driven by popular media coverage: “the perception of addiction likely arises from popular media’s frequent labeling of social media as addictive (vs. habit forming).”
Their study experimentally demonstrated that framing routine Instagram use as addiction “has deleterious consequences for user self-efficacy, including reducing perceived control over social media use and increasing self-blame for overuse. In addition, misperceiving excessive social media use as addictive potentially diverts users from effective strategies that could be used to curb overuse habits.”
Put another way, the anti-tech activists describing social media as addictive are possibly doing more harm to Internet users than social media addiction itself.
The authors concluded by warning that “continued overuse of this terminology risks stigmatizing healthy usage, wasting public health resources, and contributing to moral panic around social media use.“
That is the actual peer-reviewed science on the question, published less than six months ago, by researchers at the University of Southern California in one of the most institutionally credible scientific journals in the world.
“But Jonathan Haidt said this is a problem, and he’s a psychologist!” I hear the safety crowd cry. Haidt is a writer, and those writings can be subjected to scrutiny. Other scientists have criticized the “online safety” crowd’s most sacred texts, such as aforementioned Anxious Generation by Haidt. One review of that work, also published in Nature, states plainly: “Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story about children’s development that many parents are primed to believe. Second, the book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science.”
Summing up, there’s a lot of pseudoscientific, or simply false, information being promulgated by pro-ban activists in favor of their position.
Members of the British medical establishment and the British media should know this. Many of them probably do.
Cigarettes and social media are not the same. Not even close.
What the British media actually said today
That didn’t stop the British government from rolling out the mother of all coordinated media campaigns today, the day the government intends to use to manufacture consent for a U-16 social media ban or further legislative restrictions on U.S.-designed software applications, by equating cigarettes and publishing platforms.
The claim was repeated or reported on, uncritically, practically everywhere across the British media ecosystem this morning, and was later syndicated across the planet.
That media ecosystem should, today, should be ashamed of itself. Here’s a round-up/hall of shame of every major British news outlet repeating this state-approved falsehood today:
The BBC:
More BBC, this time with an actual doctor on TV being audibly and visibly wrong on the science:
Reuters:
The Times:
LBC:
RTE:
ITV:
The Mirror:
The Independent:
The Guardian quotes the Chair of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, confidently asserting that her organization did not need to adhere to the scientific method to prove this claim because there was an “overwhelming consensus” among practitioners that something needed to be done.
We saw an overwhelming medical practitioner consensus over the UK’s extreme COVID lockdowns, too; those didn’t work. Consensus ain’t proof. Particularly in a country where most doctors are on the payroll of the government, we have to view medical industry endorsement of government policy with extreme skepticism:
Technology Org News:
The Telegraph:
Oh, and look, a poll that shows everyone believes the lie, timed to release on the same day as the lie is told: