Noah Smith, Columnist

Social Media Looks Like the New Opiate of the Masses

Researchers have found some troubling parallels with addictive drugs.

Time to stop when you start seeing double.

Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
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With Facebook enduring a wave of public criticism for its cavalier approach to user privacy, it’s becoming more apparent how important social media has become. I suspect it will be many years before the true scale and scope of the changes are appreciated, and even then much will never be fully understood. The era when humans interacted mainly by gathering in physical space, or maintained personal networks through one-to-one connections, has drawn to a close, and the next generation won’t even really understand what that era was like. Social media has changed the meaning of human life itself.

It has also made a lot of money and investors have given companies like Facebook Inc., Snap Inc., and Twitter Inc. multibillion-dollar market valuations.