Social media is not as dangerous as smoking.
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. Using TikTok is essentially the same thing as reading or watching television. Humans have sat in front of screens with few biomedical ill-effects (except perhaps for the side effects associated with being sedentary instead of active) for nearly a century.
Cigarettes and social media are not the same. Not even close.
That didn’t stop the British government from rolling out the mother of all coordinated media campaigns today, the day the government intends to announce a U-16 social media ban, by equating those two things.
The claim was repeated or reported on uncritically practically everywhere across the British media ecosystem this morning.
That media ecosystem should, today, should be ashamed of itself.
The BBC:
The Times:
LBC:
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, and consensus ain’t scientific 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:
