Good things there are entire fields of medical experts working to understand the exact mechanisms and harm and we're not leaving it up to you.
Not to mention how often we keep catching these companies with explicit policies to make people never want to leave the app.
> Good things there are entire fields of medical experts working to understand the exact mechanisms and harm and we're not leaving it up to you.
No, that doesn't work. Harm is a normative concept, not an empirical one, so there's no role for "expertise" to play in defining it. Medical experts can describe mechanisms of causality, and their associated effects, but deciding whether those effects constitute harm is something that actually is up to each individual to decide, since it is an inherently subjective evaluation.
> Not to mention how often we keep catching these companies with explicit policies to make people never want to leave the app.
Yes, and attesting one thing while doing another is certainly something they can be held accountable for -- perhaps even legally, in some cases. But this attempt at treating social media as equivalent to physically addictive chemicals is pure equivocation, and making claims like this actually undercuts the credibility of otherwise valid critiques of social media.
At the end of the day, this is a cultural issue, not a medical one, and needs to be solved via cultural norms, not via political intervention based on contrived pretenses.
Just to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding you, I double checked the meaning of "normative." This is the first result from google:
"establishing, relating to, or deriving from a standard or norm, especially of behavior."
And other sources have something similar. I'm interpreting your comment as saying "(psychological) harm is subjective, and because it can not be measured empirically, it's not possible to have expertise on this topic."
Fortunately, there are real world consequences that can be measured. If I take an action that makes many people say "ow!" and we acknowledge that expression as an indicator of pain, even though I can't measure the exact level of pain each person is experiencing, I can measure how many people are saying "ow!" I can measure the relationship between the intensity of my action, and the number of people that respond negatively. There's plenty of room for empiricism here, and a whole field of mathematics (statistics) that supports handling "normative" experiences. They even have a distribution for it!
The foundation of law is not scientific exactness or scientific empiricism. It is the mechanism by which a state establishes norms. A law against murder does not stop murder, but it does tell you that society does not appreciate it.
They are saying that judgements of what qualifies as harm is something like a judgement of what is good, or what is right or wrong. That’s not the same thing as evaluating whether something causes pain. You can measure whether something caused pain, sure. (Well, the sort of limitations you mentioned in measuring pain exist, but as you said, they are not a major issue.)
“Harm” isn’t the same thing as “pain”.
I would say that when I bite my finger to make a point, I experience pain, but this doesn’t cause me any suffering nor any harm. If something broke my arm, I claim that this is harm to me. While this (“if my arm were broken, that would be harm to me”) might seem like an obvious statement, and I do claim that it is a fact, not just an opinion, I think I agree that it is a normative claim. It is a claim about what counts as good or bad for me.
I don’t think normative claims (such as “It is immoral to murder someone.”) are empirical claims? (Though I do claim that they at least often have truth values.)