Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Social Media Addiction Isn't Real— Here is What's Really Happening

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenz         Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co     <<< FREE SPEECH FRIDAY>>>People cannot stop claiming they are "addicted" to social media. Lawmakers continue to compare social media use to drug or alcohol addictions, while the media pushes an addiction framework for quitting social media. But last week, a big new research paper dropped that debunks all of these narratives. The studies found that not only are a lot of our perceptions around social media and addiction completely wrong, just framing social media use as addiction *itself*is actually extremely harmful and makes it even HARDER to moderate your use of tech products.  Ian Anderson is one of the researchers at the California Institute of Technology who conducted the study. He's joined me today to break down what the research on social media and addiction actually says, how the media's framing of technology use as addiction is causing enormous harm, and what we can all do to actually fight back against big tech. He also gives tips on how to cut down on your own social media use.Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz                https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0                https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz 

People thought that they were addicted and would call themselves addicted even though they weren't. They did not fit into the category of actually addicted to the app. Over the past few years, the language of social media addiction has taken over the media. Despite these inflammatory news reports, a big new research paper containing two major studies found that not only are a lot of our perceptions around social media and addiction completely wrong, framing social media use as an addiction, itself is actually extremely harmful and makes it even harder to moderate our use of tech products. Ian Anderson is a researcher at the California Institute of Technology who conducted the study

along with his colleague Wendy Wood. He joins me today to break down what his research found, how the media's framing of technology use as an addiction is causing enormous harm, and to talk about what we can all do to actually meaningfully fight back against big tech. Ian, welcome. Hi, thanks for having me. First of all, Ian, what made you want to study the concept of social media addiction? I think noticing that you can't kind of go five minutes online without seeing someone either compare social media use to cigarettes or describe themselves.

Even in real life, you see this all the time where people are like, oh, I'm so addicted to my Instagram. Oh, I'm so addicted to TikTok. This is really common language that people use. And I, as someone who studies habits, and also how those relate or don't to addiction, was really interested in whether or not this was having an effect on how people perceive their social media use and also whether or not they feel like they can manage it in ways that make sense. Tell me a little bit about what you study. What sort of research do you do and what's your kind of field of practice? So my PhD was in social psychology, and I spent the entire time, basically, studying how habits form in relationship to technology. So basically the process by which we start to

post information online, scroll, share content, all of these little activities that you do in your daily use of social media. I was studying how these become highly frequent and how they become habitual in sort of like a in the scientific definition of that term. I feel like that's such a fascinating thing to study and also such a relevant field of study right now, just given the sense of like technology's role in our life and how we're all like, I guess, forming habits around it. Yeah, absolutely. My background before that was actually in social media marketing. So as a consultant, I was watching how social media was affecting people and affecting the world. And I was really fascinated by that. And that's sort of what drove me into researching this in the first place. And I found

basically this framework in social psychology of habit formation and social learning to be extremely useful in terms of explaining how social media is affecting people and changing our behavior. How did you conduct these studies? So both of the studies were done online, but using verified users of the Instagram platform that were representative of U.S. adults on demographics like race, age, gender, these kind of things. Tell me what some of these questions were measuring. So we were really interested in a number of things. And one of the primary things that we're interested in was actual symptoms of addiction.

So are people at risk for Instagram addiction defined how the clinical researchers are currently defining it? We used a scientific scale that had six components. So the six questions. The first is if you spend a lot of time thinking about Instagram or planning to use it, Do you feel an urge to use it more and more often? Do you use it to forget about your personal problems? How often have you tried to cut down on the use of Instagram without success? How often have you become restless or troubled if you have been prohibited from using Instagram?

And have you used Instagram so much that it had a negative impact on your job or studies? So these are the six questions that you asked these users? Yeah. These are the six components of Instagram addiction. Okay. So walk me through some of the first. of your findings. Yeah.

In the first study, we found a big overperception of being addicted to Instagram. And what overperception means is that people thought that they were addicted and would call themselves addicted even though they weren't. They did not fit into the category of actually addicted to the app. Why do you think that is? I would say there are a few things driving that. One would be the fact that colloquially, we use addiction as a time. term very casually, right? And I don't think many people know exactly what the clinical definition of it is.

Second, I would say that there is a large overuse of the term in the media and also from policymakers and other institutions. So I think combined with those two things, you see this addiction terminology becoming the norm, right? It's like the way that you describe heavy social media use. When you're talking about heavy use or highly frequent use, you're always saying addiction. Yeah, it seems like this is just how people talk about social media these days. It's like, oh, I'm so addicted, you know. What does it mean to be addicted to social media? Because I kind of always argued that can you be like really addicted to like messaging your friends on an app?

That's a great question. And it's one that is actually a big debate in the scientific literature as well. So even clinical addiction scientists can't really agree on whether or not behaviors like social media use should be categorized as an addiction. Right. And that's the reason that it's not in the diagnostic manual of clinical addictions, which are used to diagnose things like depression, these things that we consider serious clinical addictions. Social media addiction is not in there. Yeah. There's no such thing as like internet addiction, social media addiction. I mean, I've talked to a lot of researchers about this like concept. And as you know as well, so many people also use these apps radically differently. When you say you're addicted to Instagram, like what do you mean? Are you watching real? 24-7, are you messaging your friends as a lot of young people do? The primary way that a lot of young people use Instagram is through messages to DM. It's literally the core experience down on the app.

So I've always found this to just be like very problematic framing. And I feel like it seems like I'm curious if you felt like this too. It seems like a lot of it's very heavily influenced by the media framing it this way. That's actually one thing that we found in our study. That's pretty likely the case. We did a media analysis and compared the use of the term social media. addiction to the use of a more neutral term like social media habit. And the addiction framing or that term is used like 500 times the amount that a more

neutral phrase like social media habit is. So that kind of pathologizing language and like addiction is kind of negative. It's pathologizing of heavy use and that's used way more frequently than a more neutral term. Do you think that that like aggressive media coverage and like these lawmakers claiming that social media, you know, people are getting addicted to social media is leading to the results that you found, where these huge amounts of people are believing that they're addicted to these products? Yeah. So I think it's highly likely. And actually, that is very similar to what we looked at in our second study. What did your second study find? That increased perception does have negative impacts.

It does harm to frequent users. And that is what the second study within our paper, There are two studies in there that we looked at. And so in that second study, we basically aimed to see what happened when you increased people's perceived addiction to Instagram. So basically like we exposed them to some text basically saying you're a frequent user of social media. That suggests you might have a social media addiction. Reflect on some times recently when you felt like you were addicted to social media or to Instagram. the specific case. So you're like sort of like mimicking like the effect potentially that like these types of articles would have on users. Precisely. So we are basically trying to imitate the effect

of seeing one piece of content or one article framing Instagram use as addiction on people's perceived addiction. And we find that this effect is pretty harmful. Like you see significant decreases in people's perceived ability to manage and control their social media. use, you see them start blaming themselves more for overusing social media and you see them feel more negatively about their Instagram use overall. That is so crazy because I feel like we're hearing all of this stuff about these tech companies that are obviously, first of all, the tech companies are doing evil things. They're not, we're not like apologizing for them here.

But like I do feel like there's so much blame placed on them saying like, look at you guys, you know, you're getting all these kids addicted and addiction, social media addiction, da, da, da, da, da. But it seems like your study. found that like the media also plays a significant role in people's own perceptions and like you said, has these like serious consequences that actually negatively affect user behavior. Yeah, absolutely. And so I think the study imparts the idea that one, you're not addicted to social media

most likely, right? That first study, only 2% of the entire sample actually showed symptoms of being at risk for social media addiction. So even the small percentage of people that were at risk for addiction, you still need to have that diagnosed by a clinician. So the actual percentage is likely lower. Yeah, probably significantly lower.

However, we're being constantly exposed to media that tells us you're probably addicted to these apps. And that's a big mismatch, and it's not a harmless one, right? And I think that the entire conversation around it needs an adjustment. And I think our studies suggest that like using the term addiction more accurately, right, like when it actually applies to maybe people who really do have clinical problems. And for the rest of us, a more neutral term is probably better to use. And I don't think

it would have the same effects. Yeah. Well, I feel like it will probably help a lot of people actually moderate their Instagram use because I'm sure there are people that are going to listen to this or watch it and be in the comments like, oh, but I'm really addicted or whatever. And I feel like what you're saying is maybe by like reframing it and recognizing like, okay, actually this is just like a habit that I can't stop engaging in or like it's a really bad habit. Like we all have really bad habits in our life, I guess, and different things. That might like actually give you better tools and a better framework to moderate your use. Whereas like if you believe it to be an addiction, you sort of you can't treat it that way because

it's not going to work. Exactly. And I think like the addiction framing leads you down a different path of solutions, right? It leaves you to propose like doing detoxes or like rehab. And a lot of those are actually quite time consuming and expensive. And if you have a habit rather than an addiction, they might not actually work. So as a habit researcher, what we've shown is that because mobile devices are with us constantly, it has changed the way that we consume media. But I think all of us have kind of had these experiences where you brush up against what we would call, like, an actual habit. And those are basically when, you know, you go onto your phone probably to do something else, like, look something up. And then suddenly it's been 30 minutes and you are deep in an Instagram real squirrel or like a TikTok scroll.

You're like, how did that even happen? Right. And that's because habits are basically engaged pretty thoughtlessly and automatically, right? and they are tough to control with just willpower and intentions alone. That's part of the scientific definition of habit and also some of the things that we study is that like when people lose control over the behavior due to habit, they find that hard to explain. And it's better if they have these kind of habit-based solutions in front of them

so they can choose those instead of going down this pathway of like, oh, I'm so addicted, like, oh, I need to go to like phone rehab or like, you know, we need to be. ban all the smartphones, for example. Yeah, it actually, I would imagine this makes smartphone bans even more dangerous because it, like, can exacerbate these problems rather than fix it. I need to write, like, a longer story on this, but I'm so horrified by this entire predatory industry that sprung up, especially around teens, treating social media addiction. And in some cases, they have these, like, brutal, like, rehab programs, you know, like,

it's like the troubled teen type stuff where they, like, pull the kid out and they, you know, them to the woods in Utah, whatever, and abuse these kids, traumatize these kids, all to treat their alleged, you know, quote unquote social media addiction, which is not even a real thing. And then even adults I've talked to, you know, they'll do similar things like take these extreme measures or support really dangerous legislation because they feel like they themselves cannot control, you know, their use. And so I just think that like the stuff that you've found is it's so important for people to, to like understand these different things. Knowing that social media use tends to be more of like a habit or bad habit, maybe, if you feel like it's having a negative

consequence on your life, like, how can people effectively moderate their use? If it's not replicating the like digital detox, like 12-step program for tech or whatever, like what sort of things are effective? Yeah. So I think, and a lot of these strategies are pretty simple, and I think a lot of people already use them. So one pathway that you can use is introducing more friction into the sort of places or the pathways that usually cause you to use the app in ways that you don't like. And what I mean by friction is basically like making it harder to use the social media app. So you could like move it to other parts of your phone screen. You could delete the app from your smartphone screen and like force yourself to redownload it.

Because basically like when you have a habit, the smartphone itself or like the spot where that app is on the screen, becomes a cue to log on, right? Or like, you can stop notifications from coming in, right? And like, the stronger your habit, the harder you're probably going to have to push to, like, intervene on yourself, right? So you're basically doing kind of like scientific intervention studies to see what the most effective way of, like, managing your own use is, right? I actually was talking to a student a few weeks ago who said something funny, and he was like, okay, so once I've done that, that's my chance to be a chance to be able to be able to be able to be, that's my chance to lock in. And I was like, yes.

So you have to lock in and then start to try to break the habit. And sometimes it can be useful to also build a new habit, right? There are some studies who have tried to replace social media habits with like duolingo use or like other things. So I think it's really something for people to determine on their own whether or not their social media habits are really bad. And I don't think that we should really pass that like kind of moralized or like pathologizing judgment on them. and they should be the ones to decide, you know, what is a behavior that I would rather be doing? And you can try to work to use those moments where you have like, you know, deleted the app to try to maybe change your behavior. And that's when it will be most effective.

Yeah. I feel like, I mean, I know some people that just use like TikTok or Instagram on the web now because the experience is so much worse and it just like makes them, I don't know. I also read about this like company recently that these kids started to like try to make a really heavy phone case. So the phone case is like, I think it's like six or eight pounds. But it just makes it really heavy to hold your phone. So you just don't end up scrolling as long on it because it's like a heavy case. Oh, like it hurts your wrist. Yeah.

Like you just, it's like heavy. And you just don't feel like holding it that long. No. I mean, like those kind of things can all be useful. I don't know if the heavy phone case is like as much of a habit intervention. But I guess it is because it kind of like it makes the activity like more tiring and and like less sustainable. Right.

That would be the goal of those type of interventions. Yeah. One of the people that I saw online talking about it was just saying like, I just sometimes like I'm on my phone and forget that I'm on my phone. And I feel like if it's like a little bit heavier, you're like, okay, you know, you're on your, you know what I mean? You're like feeling it that you're on your phone. I guess that makes a lot of sense because, you know, the thing I was describing before,

where you're kind of like thoughtlessly using the phone and like suddenly you're like, oh shit, I've been on here for like a whole hour. Those are called like habit slips in the scientific literature. And it's basically moments when you kind of. realize that you have a habit because you've brushed up against a behavior that's pretty thoughtless. And I think like anything you can do to make that behavior like more intentional is going to help you manage your use better. One thing I feel like we hear a lot from the government, especially when they're trying to censor social media or ban phones or whatever kind of nonsense they're up to, is this idea of like, you know, they're getting the children addicted. They're getting kids addicted.

You know, it's these young minds that they're corrupting. And I'm curious if you found any kind of discrepancies between like how old people were and like what they believed about their own addictions to social media. Like if you broke things down by age at all. Because it seems like, you know, I am always so fascinated when I write about these topics of people's perceptions because you have boomers that will talk all day long about social media addiction and the youth. And those people are on their phones more than I've ever seen anybody else. Like they might be more on Facebook than, you know, TikTok. But like they're plugged in. And I hear this lot from parents as well, like, that say, oh, you.

you know, my children are so addicted to technology. And the kids, I've done a lot of, you know, interviewing of children. And they'll be like, well, my mom sits on her phone all day. She can't get off of it. So I don't know. I'm just curious, like, what you found in terms of, like, age breakdown or if there was any gender differences or anything like that. Yeah, that's actually a great question.

We don't talk about this as much in the main paper, but we did, you know, we have that demographic information. And one thing that we did see, this is actually in like the supplemental material, which is, it's all online if you want to go chase it down. But we also. surveyed TikTok users, and these were college students about their perceived addiction and actual addiction. And the gap was even bigger than the Instagram one. Like it was 59% thought that they were addicted to TikTok, but only 9% of people were within the at-risk of clinical addiction category.

So while I can't really speak to whether or not that's related to age or whether it's related to TikTok being different from Instagram, Like, it's clear that there was even a greater overperception there. And the other thing that we found flipping back to the Instagram people is that younger users perceive themselves to be less addicted to Instagram than older users. That's so interesting. And I'm so interested in the ways that, like, people's perceptions of these apps shape their beliefs around it. I feel like there's this idea, especially in the media that TikTok is uniquely addicting. You had members of Congress arguing that it was. digital fentanyl or whatever.

And so it's interesting that just, and I know you only surveyed the college students for TikTok, just that there was such high perception of addiction when it came to TikTok. And that idea that like so many college students that you surveyed that used TikTok reported that they felt addicted. Yeah. And again, like the number of people who actually fell into the addiction at risk category for TikTok is very low. Like it's only 9%. Like that is not a big proportion of the sample. And that's even just at risk for potential, which addiction, which I would argue, again, does not exist. Like, there are so many different ways to use these apps and their communication

tools as much as their media consumption tools. And I've done a bunch of like videos about kind of the history of different technologies and this idea that, you know, back when landline telephones came out, people thought that women especially were addicted to talking to friends on them. And it was this harmful thing to be on the landline telephone all the time. And I feel like a lot of that, this language around addiction also stigmatizes completely normal behaviors that young people have where they're on these platforms like DMing each other things or having conversations or having like real social interaction with friends. And then you're getting this sort of like negative messaging about that behavior in the media as if it's like some wrong, bad thing.

Yeah. And I think that the confidence with which the media posits that this is an addiction is very out of step with the scientific literature. As I said before, even the addiction scientists who came up with the idea that there could be social media addiction can't agree on like what should be included in the symptoms of it and can't agree on whether or not behaviors like social media use should be counted as addictions, right? So there's a lot of controversy about this within science as well. Well, it just reminds me so much of the conversations around addiction to, and these aren't even communication platforms, but like novels and comic books as well, where, you know, people back then the scientists and you basically have like, I, in my opinion, like legitimate good

scientists and then you have kind of like industry corrupted like grifter type people that are sometimes not even experts in the field that they're talking about that are like writing these books or you know making big names for themselves that are like oh you know this social media addiction thing is real or this novel these kids are getting addicted to novels and it's leading to them into lives of crime and mental health issues because with novels and comic books it was that they they thought that the kids would you know we're getting crazy perceptions of life and that that would lead them to kind of engage in all this terrible behavior and i just feel like a lot of this stuff that you see today is sort of a repackaging of that same stuff. And the same, like, you hear the exact same arguments. Like, the people that are arguing it's not addiction, they've never really changed their position throughout, you know, these moral panics, but the people that are making the argument, you know, for addiction or claiming, you know, this new form of media or communication is

addicting. Like, they always seem to claim, oh, well, yeah, we were wrong about, like, you know, the past, like, dozens and dozens of moral panics, but, like, this time it's really happening. Yeah. And I think a lot of those narratives rely on the idea that addiction is very widespread. And I think like our results show that that's clearly not the case. Also, our study shows that it's potentially harmful, right, to kind of force people to buy into these narratives and could potentially be causing us to invest in bad policy around these things,

which I think is a big problem. Yeah, I wonder if this will have any effect on policy. I mean, there was this great paper that came out that was for top researchers in the country. It was like Alice Marwick. I can't remember all of them. But they issued this big paper a year ago that was this like 82 page report talking about how we're getting these really dangerous policies that are not based in science and that we're in the midst of a moral panic. And they named specifically this one man for like driving a lot of it. And it was so disturbing.

Like no one in the media picked it up despite the fact that you have like some of these big name, you know, writers. And I'm curious like I know your paper just came out. But it seems like every single time we find some, you know, new article claiming, oh, you know, 90% of teenagers are addicted to social. media, like that's a news headline in the New York Times tomorrow. Have you gotten any pickup on your paper? Yeah, a little bit. We've been working with the scientific reports press team who have been pretty great. And there's been two or three interview requests, which is, that's a high number for a scientific paper, but nothing compared to a lot of the coverage that some of the addiction research is getting. Yeah. I mean, or just like the most low quality surveys ever. Like, they'll just do some like

online survey that says, like, do you think you're addicted? They're not even like testing to see if these people are real. And then it's like ends up as a news headline on, you know, NPR and all these other outlets. Yeah. I think there's a big like portion of the social media research. And this is actually one of the reasons why I wanted to study this in the first place that kind of has uncritically adopted the use of addiction scales, right, instead of using like just frequency or habit measures, right, which I think has contributed to the narrative around like pathologizing the behavior. And And that's something that I think within the scientific world that myself and other people in this area are sort of pushing back against. So that's another kind of desired outcome of this paper.

Okay. Well, you're doing the Lord's work. So thank you. I feel like there's going to be some amount of people to listen to this. They're like, oh, you know, anytime you try to add nuance to these conversations, they're like, oh, you're just apologizing for big tech or like you're on the side of big tech because you don't believe social media addiction is real or whatever, you know, despite the fact that, again, I just want to reiterate, I think what's so great about your paper is actually. shows the harms of this framing and why it actually gives people even less ability to really effectively kind of moderate the use of these platforms. But I'm curious, like, what your thoughts are on that? Like, are you sympathetic to big tech or what is yours of perception of the industry

having done this research? No. And I would say that our research doesn't suggest as much that we should be sympathetic to big tech, but we should actually push them to build tools that allow users to actually have control over their use and manage it. Because right now, you know, a lot of my past research basically shows that tech companies build strong habits to make people stay online for longer than they'd like to, right? So there is this problem of overuse. What our paper is suggesting is that the addiction framing is just the wrong way to solve that. I think that's so key because giving users more control is something that tech companies hate to

do. And there's almost no organized pressure to advocate for more user control. I mean, I think of this in the context of safety a lot because they claim, so many of these bills claim to be out about online safety and things, but it wasn't until really recently even that like Twitter allowed you to like start limiting replies. You still can't even turn off quote tweets or whatever on there. Like these platforms make it so hard to even control our own experience or limit our own notifications or like restrict our own use, you know, through different tools on the apps. And there's so much focused on like instead that yeah, these like blanket like government bands or censorship laws. Absolutely. And I think like, you know, if the only options we have are things like screen time

and like, you know, deleting the app from our phone, like we should have more options than that. And I think like we should all collectively push big tech and tech companies to do this, even though, you know, that's very hard that they don't seem to be listening to their users these days. Well, to do that, we have to stop buying into this bullshit framework of addiction. And we need to have real conversations about habit form behaviors. And we also need law that actually understand how these platforms really work. 100% completely agreed out to all of that. Ian, thank you so much for chatting with me today.

Thank you so much for inviting me. It was wonderful to be here. That's it for this week's show. Don't forget to subscribe to my Patreon via the link below or by a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter, usermag.com, usermag.com, if you like my work and you want to keep this show going. Right now, I have zero long-term brand partnerships.

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