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Gambling is also an addiction with a non-chemical basis
Why only a subset? Because not everyone gets cancer from cigarettes. But, like social media, the probability of a negative outcome is too high to ignore.
(1) Did they know they were hurting users? (2) Can the harm be shown.
The big tobacco companies intentionally suppressed studies that showed harm, and promoted their product while knowing that. Facebook appears to have done the same.
The headline talks about parallels. A closer example is gambling if you are concerned with physical properties of a system. Light and sound.
I think we're missing the point debating addictiveness. meta very deliberately use patterns that result in compulsive usage - and at the scale they operate - cause a substantial amount of societal damage as a result.
fundamentally different how? Because they use your visual cortex to trigger neurons?
Have you experienced addiction before? Nicotine withdrawal doesn't make your hand move on it's own, it makes you crave a cigarette, and then you pick up a cigarette and smoke it to make the craving go away.
If you crave scrolling instagram, even when you want to be doing anything else, isn't that the same thing? Maybe you can't point at a specific molecular basis - yet (if you were to look at dopamine and other neurotransmitters, I wouldn't be surprised if social media spikes them in a way similar to other vices) - but the outcome is the same.
What?
They referred to it as 'crack nicotine' internally. It was an entire, giant scandal. They made a movie about it.
This product that kills the users of it with remarkably high rates and has effectively no positive use is fundamentally different from light and sound.