If one accepts proclamations by plaintiffs’ attorneys in today’s consolidated social media addiction cases in Los Angeles, the companies behind online applications such as Instagram (Meta) and YouTube (Google) are malicious actors—on par with tobacco companies—preying on and addicting minors.

Mark Lanier, an attorney for plaintiff K.G.M. in the opening bellwether trial, contends the companies “have been orchestrating an addiction crisis in our country and, actually, the world.” Matthew Bergman, another plaintiffs’ attorney, asserts that social media “in so many ways . . . robbed [K.G.M.] of her childhood and her adolescence.”

The master complaint in the consolidated cases pending before California Superior Court Judge Carolyn Kuhl avers that “like the cigarette industry a generation earlier, Defendants understand that a child user today becomes an adult user tomorrow” and that they borrow “heavily from the behavioral and neurobiological techniques . . . exploited by the cigarette industry.” As Techdirt’s Mike Masnick encapsulates it, “the lawyers involved are explicitly using the tobacco playbook, comparing social media to cigarettes.”

News organizations frequently invoke the tobacco analogy. A New York Times article notes that the cases “have drawn comparisons to those against Big Tobacco in the 1990s.” A Fox News story headline claims “Big Tech’s tobacco moment is here.”

Several significant differences, however, illustrate why the tobacco analogy is flawed.

The First Amendment. Social media platforms are speech services: They allow minors (and adults) to receive and engage in lawful expression safeguarded by the First Amendment. Thus, important expressive constitutional rights—those of users and the platforms themselves—are in play when litigation targets social media companies. Suing tobacco and cigarette companies raises no First Amendment concerns; their products don’t convey expression.

Physical Harms vs. Mental Health Claims. Tobacco and cigarette usage involves the physical ingestion of substances that can cause the fatal physical harm of cancer. The US Food and Drug Administration bluntly observes “there is no safe tobacco product.”

The plaintiffs in the social media cases, however, claim harms that don’t involve ingesting a physical substance. Instead, they concentrate largely on mental health injuries purportedly caused by “an array of design features” that supposedly addict minors to watching First Amendment-protected content. Indeed, K.G.M.’s second-amended, short-form complaint alleges injuries including depression, anxiety, suicidality, and body dysmorphia. The physical harm she allegedly suffered—cutting—perhaps is a manifestation of mental health issues.

Multiple Benefits of Social Media. Unlike tobacco and cigarette consumption, using social media carries multiple important benefits. A 2024 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine observes that “the use of social media, like many things in life, may be a constantly shifting calculus of the risky, the beneficial, and the mundane.” The report notes that “one of the most obvious potential benefits of social media is its power to connect friends and family” and that “social media platforms offer a means of social connection.” It adds that:

Social media provides a quick, convenient way to learn about and discuss current events. The social connectedness and community building discussed earlier . . . also have ramifications for offline civic activity. The Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, for example, has used social media to exponentially expand her reach, informing adolescents around the world about a school strike for climate change, which eventually grew into a global environmental movement.

Addiction, Habit, or Engagement? While cigarettes and tobacco may cause substance addiction fueled by nicotine, the social media litigation pivots on alleged behavioral addiction. Importantly, “there’s no official list of symptoms of social media addiction” and there is “only one type of behavioral addiction — gambling disorder” in the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR).

Professor Tamar Mendelson recently explained in the Washington Post that social media addiction is not recognized as an official psychiatric diagnosis and that “it’s a complex issue. Research doesn’t show that all digital media use is bad or addictive.” Indeed, a recent study concludes that overusing the word “addiction” and framing heavy social media usage as an “addiction” is problematically counterproductive:

Although pathologizing social media use may help spur public support for regulatory policies, our findings suggest caution in applying addiction language too broadly. Broad application of the behavioral addiction framework to social media use has blurred the conceptual boundary between habits and addictions in research, misclassifying routine technology use as inherently harmful.

The study, which suggests a fundamental distinction between habits and addictions, adds that “misclassifying frequent social media and technology use as addictive has muddled public understanding of the psychology behind these behaviors and likely inhibits users’ understanding of the ways to effectively control their own behavior.”

In sum, the tobacco analogy only goes so far—not far enough to deliver a settlement money train that some attorneys and plaintiffs likely want to see rolling through town.