What Social Media Addiction Borrowed From Tobacco

Social media addiction did not emerge by accident. It follows a long history of industries built on compulsion. Tobacco companies once engineered products around dependency while publicly minimizing harm. Social platforms adopted similar strategies, replacing chemicals with behavioral design.

Social media addiction thrives on reward loops, uncertainty, and repetition. Likes, notifications, infinite scroll, and algorithmic timing create feedback systems that keep users engaged far longer than intended. These mechanisms are not neutral features. They are deliberate design choices optimized for attention extraction.

This work places social media addiction within a broader cultural lineage. When engagement becomes profit, platforms are incentivized to keep users activated rather than informed or fulfilled. The result is a system that shapes behavior while avoiding responsibility for its effects.

Understanding social media addiction requires looking beyond individual self control and toward structural design. The question is not why people struggle to log off, but why systems are built to make disengagement so difficult.