They're using manipulative tricks from casinos, among other things.
The machine always wins: what drives our addiction to social media
The long read: Social media was supposed to liberate us, but for many people it has proved addictive, punishing and toxic. What keeps us hooked?
Traditional Social Media as a Prison · What’s Happening on My Feed?
Social media apps have become a vehicle for community building, world news, and political campaigns. As app owners have enmeshed themselves more with the state, the carceral logics that haunt marginalized communities offline, became a part of their digital realities online.
Traditional Social Media as a Prison - What’s Happening on My Feed?
Social media apps have become a vehicle for community building, world news, and political campaigns. As app owners have enmeshed themselves more with the state, the carceral logics that haunt marginalized communities offline, became a part of their digital realities online.
ADDICTION BY DESIGN: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas – Natasha Dow Schüll
Slot machines, revamped by evermore compelling digital and video technology, have unseated traditional casino games as the gambling industry’s revenue mainstay. Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll explores the dark side of machine gambling—a solitary, rapid, continuous form of play that has less to do with the competitive thrill of winning than with the pull of “the machine zone,” as gamblers call the trancelike state they enter.
What legal experts say about a major ‘bellwether trial’ over child social media addiction
A California woman is accusing major social media companies of designing their products to be addictive, especially to children.
Big Tech tried to get young people addicted. Now we’re fighting back
Two seismic court decisions in the US have intervened where legislators have failed to defend social media users from exploitation, writes campaigner Zamaan Qureshi
More Than a Quarter of Americans Gamble Online Daily, But Frequent Gamblers Likely to Self-Impose Br
As millions of Americans log on to track their college basketball pools, more than half (58%) of adults who gamble online daily say that they have intentionally taken a break or limited the amount of time they spend gambling, new poll data from the American Psychiatric Association (APA) shows.
Social media scam commodifies women's sexuality to swindle followers | CBC News
Women’s names and photos are being used in duplicate accounts to advertise adult content and trick site visitors into providing their credit card information.
Custodians of the Internet
A revealing and gripping investigation into how social media platforms police what we post online—and the large societal impact of these decisions Most use...
I used to think social media was a force for good. Now the evidence says I was wrong | Matt Haig
More and more, it’s clear these platforms create divisions, exploit our insecurities and risk our health, says novelist Matt Haig
Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media
When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms and protocols that allowed people to socialize with friends and communities of interest by using digital technologies. Twenty years later, users of social media are far more likely to scroll than post – and the content that they consume is often strategically produced and algorithmically curated. In this essay, I argue that the very essence of social media has changed. To more effectively interrogate what we are witnessing, we need to stop presuming that these tools are “social media” and begin recognizing that they are now “parasocial media.” Doing so raises new questions about digitally mediated sociality, not to mention the politics and governance of these platforms.
Experimentally manipulating social media abstinence: results of a four-week diary study
Social media use has a weak, negative association with well-being in cross-sectional and longitudinal research, but this association in experimental studies is mixed. This investigation explores wh...
Frontiers | Cyber-mobbing, technology-facilitated abuse and online violence
This article collection will explore the pressing issues of cyber-mobbing, technology-facilitated abuse and online violence, including online abuse, stalking...
Meta must face Massachusetts lawsuit over youth social media addiction, court rules
State’s top court alleges company deliberately designed features of platforms like Instagram to addict young users
How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation
The company’s AI algorithms gave it an insatiable habit for lies and hate speech. Now the man who built them can't fix the problem.
The Truth About Social Media as an "Advertising Industry," Bluesky's Gamble, and "Reclaiming Conversation" - Nightflight