Might as Well Face It: We’re Addicted to Addiction Claims | American Enterprise Institute
Shortly before defeating incumbent John Cornyn in a “bitter” primary runoff for the Lone Star State’s Republican US Senate nominee this November, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Netflix. Among other allegations, the lawsuit contends that the streaming service “is engineered to be addictive” and that its “autoplay [function] is a dark pattern designed to override conscious decision-making, extend viewing sessions, and eliminate stopping cues.” The complaint describes sinister sounding “dark patterns” as “subtle features engineered to manipulate users to take the actions Netflix wants them to take.”
Not only does the lawsuit fit snugly within what the Wall Street Journal calls Paxton’s “record of anti-business populism,” but its focus on a successful media company’s allegedly “addictive design” and “addictive nature” falls neatly in line with today’s massive wave of lawsuits targeting social media platforms and blaming their design features for allegedly addicting and harming minors. Those cases have been filed by hundreds of individuals and public school districts, as well as by attorneys general in more than 30 states in a federal multi-district litigation proceeding in Northern California and in individual actions brought in state courts. Furthermore, lawmakers—Minnesota legislators in May, for example—now are drafting statutes targeting social media platforms that include ostensibly “addictive interface features.”
There’s little doubt that March’s $6 million jury verdict in favor of 20-year-old plaintiff K.G.M. and against Meta (Facebook) and Google (YouTube) will fuel a wave of addiction claims against different varieties of media. Indeed, during trial testimony, an expert witness for K.G.M. indicated that, although she hadn’t come across a case of Netflix addiction in her own work, it might be possible for people to watch so much Netflix programming that it could harm their lives, and that people can become addicted to multiple forms of digital media.
Video game developers and publishers now are facing lawsuits premised on addictive, design-defect allegations and rooted in products liability and negligence theories. The case of Duncan v. Roblox filed in late March in federal court in Northern California against Roblox Corporation, Epic Games, Microsoft, and Mojang AB is a recent example. It hinges partly on the theory that video games cause “an intense dopamine release in the user that is similar in magnitude to that experienced by substance abuse or gambling.” The complaint also accuses the defendants of exploiting operant conditioning principles of rewards and punishments “to addict players and manipulate them into making profitable decisions for the game developers, such as spending more time playing their respective games and engaging in microtransactions.”
A recent article in Gambling Insider dubs Duncan “the latest escalation in legal challenges targeting behavioral design across digital platforms.” A plaintiffs’ firm explains on its website that “[t]hese cases focus on holding video game manufacturers accountable for exploiting vulnerable players, particularly minors and young adults, through intentionally addictive game designs.”
As with the addiction-centric cases and laws targeting social media platforms, Texas v. Netflix invokes a protect-minors-from-harm theme in playing the addiction card. Unlike them, however, Texas ties addiction to data collection and privacy concerns. It asserts that Netflix runs “a behavioral-surveillance program of staggering scale” that “requires getting Texans and their children glued to the screen and then extracting every possible piece of data about them while they are there.” In brief, addiction becomes a necessary condition that facilitates a business vacuuming up consumer information for its economic benefit. Netflix calls the case “meritless.”
Paxton’s complaint hyperbolically avers that “[a]utoplay undermines parents’ control of their children’s screen time. For a busy parent trying to manage a household under pressure, autoplay is a constant vise grip designed to keep her child fixed under Netflix’s microscope.” If that reference to autoplay sounds familiar, it’s likely because it echoes arguments in the K.G.M. case that the infinite scrolling of content—an endless, continuous feed of material without a virtual page-break or endpoint—and the automatic playback of videos make Instagram and YouTube “too irresistible to put down.”
What happened to will power, individual agency, self-efficacy, and parental responsibility? Why are we letting lawsuits and legislation targeting supposed media addictions informally police myriad communication technologies that convey lawful expression and that many people enjoy without any problems?
The anti-business exploitation of media-based addiction claims by plaintiffs’ lawyers, state attorneys general, and politicians like Paxton demands pushback. There are solid grounds for such opposition. A recent Cato Institute article notes key differences between addictions, habits, and dependence, and points out that “the conflation of addiction with dependence and habit distorts both public understanding and public policy.” The article adds that “the research base on social media addiction remains fragmented, methodologically inconsistent, and far from the kind of consensus that would ordinarily justify the regulatory and legal apparatus now being built around it.”
In short, society isn’t helpless against helplessness-grounded addiction theories.
