{"text":[[{"start":6.55,"text":"This year has brought a flurry of headlines about social media’s “Big Tobacco moment” as regulators and courts turn their attention to technology platforms. It’s easy to see why social media’s critics would hope for a tipping point akin to what happened with smoking. In the middle of the 20th century, nearly half of adults in the US smoked. By 2020, the rate was about 13 per cent. But the story of smoking’s decline had a sting in the tail: many of society’s poorest stayed hooked. Might the same be true for social media consumption?"}],[{"start":37.8,"text":"As Allan M Brandt puts it in his great history The Cigarette Century, smoking used to be “a product and a behavior with genuinely mass appeal”. In 1925, the American Mercury magazine declared that the cigarette had “become the most democratic commodity in common use”, noting that “more often than otherwise, the banker and his bootblack agree in their preferences.” Similarly, social media use in its first few decades was widespread: it was no more remarkable to see a Hollywood star obsessing over Facebook or Instagram than a teenager on the bus."}],[{"start":72.85,"text":"But when academics began to link smoking with lung cancer, it was college graduates who were the first to pick up on the information. One study shows that smoking rates among the most educated in the US began to decline as early as 1954, not long after the first articles in the general press on the topic."}],[{"start":90.69999999999999,"text":"By the 1980s, there was a distinct socio-economic skew to the decline in smoking rates. In 1985, the Wall Street Journal quoted a 37-year-old woman who was giving up because of peer pressure: she was getting dirty looks at dinner parties. “I read the other day that a third of the people still smoke,” she told the WSJ. “Where are they? I don’t know them.”"}],[{"start":114.44999999999999,"text":"That article contained a few different predictions for the future. One academic said that cigarette smoking, though declining at an uneven pace, would “disappear in the next 20 to 25 years.” Another thought that smoking patterns would reinforce socio-economic inequality. “I’m convinced that smoking diseases will increasingly become a class-based phenomenon,” he said."}],[{"start":135.6,"text":"We now know the second prediction was the correct one — and not just in the US. Breaking powerfully addictive habits — or not developing them in the first place — is harder if you have less access to education, supportive peers and healthcare. In the UK, people in the most deprived fifth of local areas are more than three times as likely to smoke (22.6 per cent) as people in the least deprived fifth of local areas (6.6 per cent)."}],[{"start":164.79999999999998,"text":"While the UK government had an ambition to reduce smoking rates to 5 per cent or below by 2030, an independent review in 2022 warned that “without further action” England would “miss the target by at least 7 years, and the poorest areas in society will not meet it until 2044”."}],[{"start":185.14999999999998,"text":"In the meantime, the UK’s health department describes smoking as “the leading cause of health inequalities” which “accounts for half of the difference in life expectancy between the most and least affluent communities in England”."}],[{"start":197.34999999999997,"text":"Is it possible that social media use will evolve in the same way? I already sense that the push for “smartphone-free childhoods” and limits on screen time is predominantly led by middle-class parents, who are devouring the emerging (though still contested) research that links social media use to harm to young people’s mental health. There is also some evidence that young people from less affluent backgrounds are more likely to have negative experiences on social media."}],[{"start":227.39999999999998,"text":"That said, there are important differences between smoking and social media. One of the big determinants of whether you become a smoker is whether your parents smoked. When it comes to social media, I don’t (yet) see much evidence of parents giving up their own social media habits, even if they are putting limits on their children. That might be fair enough: smoking is dangerous for everyone, whereas the very nature of social media algorithms is to adapt to each person. While some adults do disappear down rabbit holes, a grown-up addicted to cat videos is probably only in danger of wasting their time and attention. It is also quite possible that a new addictive technology — such as AI chatbots — will outcompete social media but lead to similar concerns."}],[{"start":273.09999999999997,"text":"Either way, there is a useful lesson in the story of smoking’s uneven decline. Addictive products can survive long after they cease to be mainstream. And if they are both addictive and harmful, they can become not just a mirror of society’s inequalities, but a magnifier of them."}],[{"start":295.8999999999999,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1777364642_6746.mp3"}