You should read the article, and my comment, a little more closely before responding. You're making a massive, unwarranted leap from "not a universal evil" to "must not have any legislation around it". I also don't think cars are pure evil....do you assume that I think that cars should be 100% unregulated? I'm specifically complaining about the maximalizing tendency of the author and others on this post: casting Facebook use as a pure vice, and ignoring the millions (hundreds of millions? I have no idea) of people who are able to get a very positive cost/benefit out of responsible use of it. Your cigarette analogy is apt in that I think that way of tobacco: I have a cigar a few times a year, and I think that the notion that tobacco is some evil force that we have to ascetically shy away from is idiotic[1].
> Which, by the way, is an awful metric for whether something should be banned
Dude, seriously, _what are you talking about_? At no point did I mention anything about banning Facebook or anything else. I don't know whose post your comment is supposed to be responding to, but just FYI you clicked "reply" under mine for some reason.
The point I am making is that "Facebook use" and "unhealthy Facebook use" are not the same thing, and the tendency I am criticizing is writing articles about the latter and bait-and-switching them to be about the former. I can use my phone to call a drug dealer, I can use my car to hit a pedestrian, I can use my computer to harass people online: and yet nobody considers those to be indictments of the overall concept of phones, cars, or computers.
---
Leaving aside the fact that your cigarette example doesn't make any sense:
Which cigarette legislation in particular are you thinking of? I'm of the same mind as the rest of society when it comes to kids being protected and having less autonomy in their decision-making, so not being able to advertise cigarettes to kids is obviously good. I'm not opposed to Pigovian taxes to balance externalities, especially when harm scales with amount of use and has significant enough externalities (like second-hand smoke), so the taxes on cigarettes don't bother me either. I think that there's some scope for paternalistic legislation of activities that don't harm others, but I think the bar has to be pretty damn high and pretty damn robust for that.