U.S. states sue Instagram owner for making social media addictive to kids

Lol predictable response proving my point.

You got your money, who cares if your product hurts people right?

With only this question as a guide the answer should be a resounding yes. Mainly because there are trade offs for everything. The downside to every trade off can be harm.

There are an immeasurable amount of ways harm can manifest, also answering no to this questions clearly incentivizes less, not more product transparency. I so desperately want to restate the question in a manner that accounts for the inevitability of discovered future liability, however it's not coming to me at the moment.

It seems really hard to define a firm line between making an addictive product and making a product that people really use a lot because it's well-made.

For instance, I play a lot of video games. If their developers got punished for getting me so hooked, that would be a real slap in the face to everyone involved.

And this is why “disinformation” is a bullshit term. Hes not spreading lies nor objective falsehoods. Hes not even making the claims you’re rebutting (physical addiction to sugar). He makes a perfectly valid point that we can all discuss as we see fit without maligning it as disinformation.

A quick search through clinical literature reveals the following points:

1. Brain Chemistry and Sugar: Sugar activates the brain's reward system by releasing opioids and dopamine, similar to addictive substances.

2. Behavioral Similarities to Addiction: High sugar intake can lead to addictive-like behaviors, such as cravings, tolerance, and withdrawal symptoms.

3. Contrasting Views in Research: While sugar affects behavior similarly to addictive substances, it's debated whether this is due to physiological addiction or other factors like emotional dependencies.

4. Physical Effects and Overconsumption: Excessive sugar consumption is linked to health issues and may create a dependency cycle, but this is not universally accepted as clinical addiction.

5. Human vs. Animal Studies: Evidence for sugar addiction largely comes from animal studies, and translating these findings to human behavior is complex due to multifaceted influences on eating habits.

The real answer here is: You don't know. You don't know because clinicians and researchers don't know, so if they don't know, you damn sure don't.

I understand dependence as requiring something to feel "normal" for whatever definition of "normal" an individual has. By this definition, I am addicted to and dependent on food, sleep, caffeine, medication, socializing, novelty, and reading. I find that I have a hard time doing less of these things, and sometimes these things get in the way of my ability to do other, healthier, more productive things. For some of these things, doing less of them would directly harm my physical health.

With this in mind, I have met many for whom sugar is an addictive substance far more deleterious to their health than even cocaine is, for example, to others I know. They've struggled with problems like diabetes and obesity, and they've even lost jobs because of their relationship with sugar. Moreover, some of them respond aggressively and defensively, much like any other addict, when friends and family try to raise the issue with them, and some of them have tried and failed to give up sugar countless times, again like anyone else struggling with addiction.

Earlier this year, I lost my mom to diabetic coma, in part, because she couldn't stop herself from eating candy and cookies all the time. She tried to stop, but she couldn't kick the habit of having a "dessert" before bed followed by the insulin necessary to control her blood sugar. It was her way of calming herself down enough to fall asleep at night. Eventually, she accidentally took too much, and no one found her until morning, long after hypoglycemia had destroyed most of her brain. She died of overdose like any other addict, although the thing she overdosed on, exogenous insulin, was a sort of secondary dependency caused by her primary dependency on sugar. The medical staff at the hospital insisted on steering me away from this terminology when discussing what happened, but their reasons were politics and marketing, not anything truly descriptive or scientific. Their fear was similar to yours in that they worried that patients might refuse insulin treatment if it was at all associated with the labels of "addiction" and "dependence." I can't help but think that she might still be around if her physician had treated her relationship with sugar more seriously or if they had more thoroughly warned her about the dangers of exogenous insulin in the context of addiction and dependence. After all, the use of exogenous insulin leads to the downregulation of insulin receptors causing "true" physiological dependence by way of a mechanism very similar to that of benzodiazepines, opioids, and alcohol. The same could be said for sugar in its role as a causal factor of diabetes itself.

“… a broad scientific consensus has emerged that there are no metabolic or endocrine response differences between HFCS and sucrose related to obesity or any other adverse health outcome. This equivalence is not surprising given that both of these sugars contain approximately equal amounts of fructose and glucose, contain the same number of calories, possess the same level of sweetness, and are absorbed identically through the gastrointestinal tract.”

HFCS is used because it’s cheaper. Not because it’s addictive.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3649104/

Nope - it's exactly the opposite. The kinds of people with the pure autism needed to get good at Factorio, Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress end up as world-class developers. Some of the best historians are going to be minted by expert paradox game players.

The games we should regulate are the garbage, zero-thought zero-gain games. Even fortnight and roblox are highly educational compared to the legalized child gambeling I see with those stupid ticket machines at places like Dave and Busters.

Also, shooters are unfortunately a national security thing. I can show you videos from the US military, especially US tank trainers and rifle trainers about how shockingly familiar that these systems are even to people who have no experience with them due to realistic portrayals in their video games. This is why "Americas Army" existed at all.

Not any different from me guilt tripping my parents into buying me an expensive pair of Jnco jeans back in the day.

Without them I wouldn't be cool and other kids would make fun of me! Or maybe they'd make fun of me for wearing those instead of something else the next year, who knows. Social pressure evolves pretty quickly.

That's just because candy/cereal companies don't need it. Slap a superhero or Elsa on the cereal box and you'll have 50% of kids under 5 crying until their parent buys the cereal.

Can we even tell whether somebody is addicted in a non-subjective way?

All they seem to have done is try to make video game enthusiasm into a mental illness. Of course there's no real treatment for it other than "just don't" either.