Brittany Luce

That was Dr. Jeffrey McCune, author of Sexual Discretion, Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing, and Kai Wright, a journalist and host for The Guardian, who has been writing about sexual politics for the last 30 years.

This episode of It's Been a Minute was produced by Corey Antonio Rose.

This episode was edited by Nina Potok.

Our supervising producer is Barton Girdwood.

Our VP of programming is Yolanda Sanguini.

All right.

That's all for this episode of It's Been a Minute from NPR.

I'm Brittany Luce.

Talk soon.

Okay, I'm going to pose an impossible question to you.

It's a totally not a yes or no question that I'm going to pose to you as a yes or no question.

Is social media addictive?

So I don't know about all of you listening, but sometimes I am scrolling through social media and I lose track of time.

And suddenly I'm watching a rug cleaning video at three o'clock in the morning on a Tuesday.

Some of you might call this kind of experience quote-unquote addictive and bad for your mental health.

And you wouldn't be alone.

In fact, you'd relate to more than a thousand individual plaintiffs who are taking social media companies to court over the addictiveness and mental health impacts of their platforms.

These court cases are the tip of a user-led backlash against social media.

Is social media bad for your health?

A jury will eventually decide, but today I want to explore that question with a tech correspondent and an addiction expert who can help us tease out what addiction is.