Moral Panic or Public Health Crisis? Lessons from Drugs and Gambling for “Addictive” Design

Alcohol, automobiles, guns, lottery, loot boxes, meat, music, opioid painkillers, processed foods, prop bets, slot machines, television, tobacco, violent video games. Over the last century each of these has been subject to concerns—some might even say “moral panics”—from parents and policymakers about avoidable harms to kids and adults. In some cases we look back with the benefit of hindsight and dismiss those concerns as naïve or moralistic. In others we look back at them as justified or as having come too late to check an expanding industry before it did unfathomable harm while growing so powerful that it became all but impossible to regulate.

As exemplified by Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, David Courtwright’s Age of Addiction, and recent Surgeon General’s warnings, today, the social media industry is increasingly subject to concerns that it causes unnecessary, avoidable harm to kids and adults. The question is: In the long run, will we look back at today’s concerns about the effects of social media on children and adults as naïve and moralistic? Or will we think that regulation came years, or decades, too late to address genuine harms? Are we in the midst of a moral panic or a public health crisis?

That is a big question. We do not come to answer it (though we have views), but to offer some insights from the broader fields of public health law and health law for scholars, parents, policymakers, and industry seeking to do so themselves. In her important book, Unwired: Gaining Control Over Addictive Technologies, Gaia Bernstein illustrates the value of a comparative approach, drawing lessons from fights around the regulation of tobacco and ultra-processed food for the regulation of social media. Building on Bernstein’s work, this symposium contribution aims to draw additional insight from experience with drug and gambling regulation for the regulation of social media, video games, AI, and other potentially-addictive technologies.

Specifically, after introducing Bernstein’s book and the foundation it lays, we draw six lessons from the study of psychoactive drugs and gambling.