The Digital Carcinogen 🚬 👍
Why Social Media is the New Tobacco
In 1953, the CEOs of the major American tobacco companies met at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Faced with emerging scientific evidence linking smoking to lung cancer, they didn’t pivot to a safer product. Instead, they hired a public relations firm to engineer a decades-long campaign of doubt. They knew their product was killing their customers, but the business model was too profitable to abandon.
Today, we are sitting in a different waiting room, but the cough is just as persistent. Social media has become the “Big Tobacco” of the 21st century. It is a product designed for dependency; it has rewired an entire generation, it’s highly addictive, dangerous for individuals and society at large, but protected by a wall of corporate obfuscation, even as the data on societal “decay” becomes impossible to ignore.
