Rhetoric like this is interesting to me because it so precisely mirrors what I heard growing up about alcohol. I had a large group of friends whose families were very religious in a religion that was very anti-alcohol. They had reached a critical mass where they didn’t know anyone who drank alcohol (or admitted to it, anyway) other than stories of severe alcoholics that got passed around the community. These stories were emphasized and amplified for them every Sunday. They truly didn’t believe that moderate or occasional alcohol consumption was possible, because to them the only thing they knew about alcohol was the part about addicts whose lives had been destroyed.

Even from a young age I thought it was strange how much they bounced these stories back and forth off of each other and how good they were at finding more stories about celebrities or local figures who had problems with alcohol to support their case.

It was also fascinating how self-congratulatory it all become. They weren’t simply sharing stories to earn each other away from a trap, they were sharing stories to reaffirm their own superiority as people who saw through the sham and wisely chose against it. The worse they made it sound, the more superior they could feel about being on the outside.

I get the exact same vibes when I read internet posts like this, which take the situation to such an extreme that they think comparisons like this are accurate and profound:

> Zuckerberg is probably worse than Escobar

Then there’s the idea that social media can’t be used for socializing, and anyone claiming otherwise is lying:

> Social media being a place to connect and maybe even run a small business is like 1% of it. It’s a place for attention seeking people filling their loneliness with fake connections and content

Yet many of us are out here using social media to keep up with friends without spending 99% of our time doing this fentanyl-like addiction that everyone tells us is inevitable.

I’m not saying that people don’t get addicted to social media, just as there are people who get addicted to alcohol (obviously). I’m merely pointing out that, like alcohol, the vast majority of people who participate aren’t degenerate addicts who lose control. This weird rhetoric about Zuckerberg being worse than Escobar or implied calls for government to treat it like drug dealers are fodder for the self-congratulatory people who want extra validation for their decision to stay off social media (defined in a way to exclude Hacker News, Reddit, and other social sites), but they’re hardly accurate. It’s weird to see these hyperbolic takes being so popular on, oddly enough, social commentary sites.