Social media should be treated like the tobacco companies

The cat's out of the bag. Computers learned how to be connected to each other a while back, and everyone got at least one internet-connected computer each more recently. Social media is technology, it can't be undone.

We could identify what is it that we think is so harmful about platforms like Facebook, and place legal limits on the _scale_ at which those deemed harmful elements are allowed to function unregulated (i.e. regulate them).

Seems like you'd just end up with a cat and mouse game. People are social creatures, and there's a goldmine of real or imagined social activity on the internet. In order to use it, you must look at the screen. We can also place ads on the screen...

What can be done? Make it illegal to run a business whose incentives are to increase "engagement"? What about newspapers?

Maybe social media giants' true crime is being the first to do an old thing at a greater scale and more efficiently than technology previously allowed.