Is social media addiction a disease, and what can we do about it when billions are hooked?
- Addiction to social media leaves sufferers feeling depressed, disconnected and alone with a narrow view of the world
- The abnormal behaviours and anxieties of social media addiction mirror those of other addictions
Is social media addictive? The issue is complex, and probably generational.
It’s obvious that what social media does to us, especially those of us who are heavy users, is not natural, or normal. It’s not normal to submit opinions for approval every day to an online crowd, nor is it normal to consume the opinions of strangers in bulk.
It’s not normal to live under the surveillance of software companies, which tailor their advertising with such eerie precision that it seems impossible that they are not listening in on our conversations. It’s definitely not normal to wake in the night to use social media, or to spend roughly 24 hours a week on it, returning again and again even though it can make us feel depressed and alone.
None of these behaviours were normal a few decades ago, nor are they especially useful to us today, but they’re practised by billions of people across the world.

A report was published recently by an all-party parliamentary group (APPG) in the UK, proposing that internet addiction could be classified as a disease, and that research into its impact on mental health could be funded by a taxing social media companies.