I would contest one point in the article, and I admit this is dependent on where you live:
> But social media is very different because it transforms social life for everyone, even for those who don’t use social media, whereas sugar consumption just harms the consumer.
In countries with single-payer healthcare (or socialised healthcare), it's not true that it harms only the consumer. If it turns into obesity, diabetes, or other medical conditions, then it may transform social life by virtue of adding pressure to the healthcare system. This is a rephrasing of the argument against smoking, where the argument that was smoking harms nobody else, and the counter was that smokers created a healthcare burden.
Arguably this is the same case in insurance-based countries, but the payment structure keeps the onus on the individual, not the overall system.
The point being that social media has damaging externalities no matter how it's framed.
>This is a rephrasing of the argument against smoking, where the argument that was smoking harms nobody else, and the counter was that smokers created a healthcare burden.
Smoking also has much more direct second hand effects from releasing smoke into the area of the smoker. Poor diet lack such effects.
Which most people would agree - smoking in public is not a personal activity; but this debate raged on throughout the 90s and early 00s. The secondary effect is on the healthcare system some time after the fact, which is the same for sugar, alcohol, smoking...where it is a new generation that is funding the care.
I don't mean to distract from the main point, but sugar is not an innocent example, especially when lobbying happened to use sugar in favour of fat.
> In countries with single-payer healthcare (or socialised healthcare), it's not true that it harms only the consumer.
This is a fallacy. Public health measures benefit some individuals more than others; but everyone benefits. Free treatment catches TB infections, for example, which occur overwhelmingly among homeless people. We're all better off if there are no homeless people wandering around with TB.
I'm glad my neighbours all benefit from the NHS, and that I'm not surrounded by sick people.
You aren’t addressing the point they are making. They aren’t arguing that socialized healthcare is worse than no socialized health care. They are saying that the societal burden of providing said health care is distributed across the population, and while it may be preferable to do so, it still means that something like excess sugar consumption has a negative effect on others.
> But social media is very different because it transforms social life for everyone, even for those who don’t use social media, whereas sugar consumption just harms the consumer.
In countries with single-payer healthcare (or socialised healthcare), it's not true that it harms only the consumer. If it turns into obesity, diabetes, or other medical conditions, then it may transform social life by virtue of adding pressure to the healthcare system. This is a rephrasing of the argument against smoking, where the argument that was smoking harms nobody else, and the counter was that smokers created a healthcare burden.
Arguably this is the same case in insurance-based countries, but the payment structure keeps the onus on the individual, not the overall system.
The point being that social media has damaging externalities no matter how it's framed.