Does Meta Know Its Platforms Are Addictive?

Published: March 17, 2026

dima-solomin-mr26tQgHGmc-unsplash — Photo from Dima Solomin via Unsplash

By Gavin Boyle

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt revealed that Meta has conducted over 30 internal studies revealing its apps are addictive — just as they were designed to be.

“[Social media] apps were designed by people who studied slot machines. Slot machines are addictive. These people took a course at Stanford on persuasive design. They learned how to use intermittent rewards, variable ratio reward schedules to hook people. And they did it, and they talked about it; we have transcripts, we have internal reports,” Haidt said. “They did 31 studies, my team has found. If you go to metasinternalsesearch.org, we’ve categorized their own studies showing that this is addictive. They talk about it. They use the word ‘addiction.’”

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Beyond these studies, it is even more telling that most social media founders do not regularly use the technology, nor do they allow their families to use it, because they know it is harmful and addictive.

“It’s a social-validation feedback loop…exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology,” Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, said in 2017. “The inventors, creators — me, Mark [Zuckerberg], Kevin Systrom on Instagram, all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”

“The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them…was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’” Parker added.

While culture has felt the impact of this design for over two decades, science only recently definitively proved that social media is harmful for users’ mental health, especially young users.

Starting in 2012, studies began to find that mental health problems like depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation began to skyrocket among youth — right around the time it became normal for them to receive smart phones and use social media.

“Smartphones and social media fundamentally changed the way teens spend their time outside of school,” said Jean Twenge, a psychologist and author of the book Generations. “You take a generation of young people, they’re spending a lot more times in their rooms, alone, not sleeping, not hanging out with their friends in person. That’s a pretty bad formula for mental health.”

Those who realized just how harmful social media is are now starting to fight back. Many people use tools to help them break their social media addictions, while others take it a step further, suing social media sites for the damage they caused. Meanwhile, lawmakers are stepping up to help protect the public through means like school cell phone bans which give children time away from their phones.

While social media has caused much harm in the roughly 20 years since it went mainstream, it is encouraging to see experts like Haidt begin to expose these companies — especially because they knew their products were addictive — and the public begin to work to move away from the addictive tech.

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