Graphic by Tula Winton
By Conrad Hamel, Violet Davis, Isong Eshiet
For students like sophomore Sam Murphy, browsing social media is an impulse that’s hard to resist, even when they have more important things on their plate.
“I don’t even mean to open it,” Murphy says. “Sometimes I’m just like, “Why not?’”
Murphy, who’s a member of Riverside’s swim team and student council, uses the most popular platforms.
“I spend like two to three hours on TikTok a day,” she explains “I use Snapchat for 30 minutes a day and 20 minutes on Instagram.”
Her behavior is common among others her age. According to the American Psychological Association, teenagers spend an average of 4.8 hours a day on social media.
Though it may seem harmless at the moment, over time the habit can become addictive and ultimately lead to other forms of addiction, too.
“Over 93% of teens use social media, which is approximately 37 million teenagers in the USA alone,” writes Leon Chaddock, CEO of Sentiment, a tech platform that integrates messages from multiple social media sites.”
Riverside is no exception, and while high rates of social media use is good for businesses like Chaddock’s, it can also lead to addiction.
“This isn’t a slight against my students, but y’all have become so addicted to your phones,” said AP Computer Science teacher Mike Dibble. “Part of the reason is social media, whether that’s checking something or checking if you’ve received a message.
This year, Riverside implemented a new cell phone policy designed to keep students off of their devices during class time. Teachers are trying to regain focus from their students that had been stolen from social media in the past years.
“I’ve been trying to make sure [social media] gets cut down on, at least in the classroom experience,” said Dibble.
Some students have taken the detachment from social media into their own hands. Senior Iris Blanton-Parke has deleted most social media from her phone.
“The little contact I’ve had with social media has been very damaging to my mental health and so I’m perfectly fine with not having it,” said Blanton Parke. “Looking at people’s bodies or their lives, it’s very picture perfect.”
To understand the significance of Tiktok, it’s important to look at its preceders. According to a 2019 Our World in Data article, social media began in the late 20th century but only really became popular in the early 2000’s. With the rise of MySpace and Facebook, teenages were introduced to a new, easier way of communicating with friends, family and even strangers.
The beginning of short form content started with Vine in 2013. After amassing roughly 200 million users, it was the most downloaded video sharing app and platform of its time.
Then in September 2016, a new platform was created by Chinese company ByteDance. Going by the name Musical.ly, which later turned into Tiktok, it quickly became the most downloaded app of all time after amassing 4.92 billion downloads and counting.
Tiktok introduced the world to a highly addictive “For You Page” with short form videos that are specially curated for each viewer.
Sophia Petrillo, in an article published in the Brown Undergraduate Journal of Public Health titled “What Makes TikTok so Addictive?” argues that the curation of personalized content was a key reason its popularity exploded.
“The global audience is heavily skewed towards younger generations, with almost half of its users under age 34,” writes Petrillo. “Teenagers make up nearly one-third of accounts”
“I’ve actually studied this,” Dibble said. “It’s something that can be very addictive, and it raises the dopamine levels in people’s brains with short form content. That’s why, more often than not now, the whole reason TikTok works is because you get that little bit of dopamine from something that happens really fast, and then you move on to the next thing.”
TikTok is so addictive because it uses random reinforcement by rewarding users with increased dopamine levels. It targets individuals’ brains by lessening viewers attention spans without them even knowing it.
“Recent studies indicate variable health effects depending on the severity of the addiction,” writes Petrillo, “and increased social media use predicts more significant health consequences.
In a Verywell Health article titled “Reverse ‘TikTok Brain’ With These 8 Dopamine Boosting Tips,” Asmae Fahmy explains the brain science behind social media addiction.
“While dopamine is essential for motivation and goal directed behavior, an excess of rapid, shallow dopamine hits—like watching TikTok videos—can erode your capacity for extended focus,” Fahmy writes.
According to BlueCrest Recover Center, an addiction treatment center in New Jersey, social media can have even worse effects than just declining your overall focus and can even impact substance abuse.
“Social media can expose people to drugs or alcohol,” its website states. “Social media addiction can also contribute to feelings of sadness, depression, and social isolation which can all lead to an increase in substance use.”
One such substance use is vaping. Vaping is relatively new to the scene as a delivery system for nicotine. After many studies have proven that cigarettes contain harmful carcinogens that can lead to or even cause cancer, the popularity of smoking cigarettes and combustible tobacco has steadily dropped from the 1960’s to the 2010’s, according to the Pew Research Center.
But for many would-be cigarette smokers, vaping has taken its place. According to a 2024 study titled “Tobacco promotion restriction policies on social media” published by the National Library of Medicine, advertisements for nicotine products like disposable vapes and other oral nicotine products were rampant on social media.
According to a 2024 National Institute of Health study, social media sites have some parameters in place for ads targeting minors.
“11 sites that are popular with youth in May 2021: Discord, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok, Tumblr, Twitch, Twitter and YouTube,” the study’s’ authors write. “Nine of the 11 sites prohibited paid advertising for tobacco products.
This has limited the amount of direct company advertising but these rules still lack to regulate promotion of nicotine products on social media. While helpful, the authors concluded it doesn’t go far enough by concluding that,
“Few addressed more novel strategies, such as sponsored/influencer content and few had age-gating to prevent youth access,” they write.
While social media and vaping are very different hobbies, both have a similar effect on the brain. Nicotine delivered by a smoke or aerosol has a similar dopamine delivery system as scrolling. They both provide small hits of dopamine back-to-back. And the hits, combined with millions of dollars spent lobbying to keep restrictions loose on their products, have fueled both industries’ rise in recent years.
By buying up companies that have taken the nicotine scene by storm such as Juul and Zynn, large parent companies like JPMorgan make it easy for lobbying in legislation to take place, according to Opensecrets.org, a tracking site for money in U.S. politics and its effect on elections and public policy.
Opensecrets also claims JPMorgan spent over 8 million dollars on lobbying just in the year of 2012.
JPMorgan isn’t the only one that is guilty of spending money on lobbying. TikTok’s parent company, Bytedance, spent well over $4 million on government lobbying just within the first half of 2023, according to Opensecrets.
Despite lobbying, state and local governments have intervened. In 2024 North Carolina won more than $40 million in a settlement with Juul. Former attorney general, and current governor, Josh Stein sued the company for targeting teens.
On January 17, 2025, the US Supreme Court upheld a law that banned TikTok in the United States since ByteDance, its China-based parent company, didn’t sell it to an American company. Although the ban only lasted a few hours, Junior Gerogi Armstrong was devastated by the affects,
“I was upset,” Armstrong said. “I’m on there scrolling for hours and I just don’t have anything to do now. I think I opened the app like 50 times when it first got banned and it kept telling me I can’t use it.”
She concluded that even though there are other apps, Tiktok is her preferred go-to.
“It’s the algorithm that really does it kind of just gives you exactly what you want.”
Junior Darryn Johnsons had a similar opinion.
“It was kind of boring,” he said. “Tiktok is funny, but like Instagram reels are just boring. Instagram is a hit or miss.”
With the app back up, Johnson says he’s relieved to have the app back to fill his freetime.
“I use it mainly before I go to sleep. I’ll be scrolling and just doze off.
Even with President Donald Trump’s agreement with the company to keep it online for the time being, people who have never downloaded it or deleted the app no longer have it available to them on the app store.
In the couple of hours the app was banned, Armstrong decided to delete it thinking it would be banned forever. When asked how she felt about potentially never having it again she responded,
“I’m really upset, really unhappy. I sound like a screenager, but I really like the app.”
