It's background education in the basics so you can understand what drug addiction is and the neurological differences in the active populations for wanting versus liking. I guess I can spell it out.
Addictive drugs directly increase wanting via directly activating the downstream targets of dopaminergic populations which predict the valence of stimuli and control of wanting and motivation. By taking a chemically addictive drug you don't even have to enjoy the stimuli related to it. You will still be conditioned to want it and be motivated to re-experience the stimuli surrounding it.
This is vastly different in mechanism and result than simply seeing or hearing a screen. These things cannot directly increase incentive salience regardless of actual valance of the stimuli. You have to actually enjoy the thing and the experiences to form habits.
Do you see the difference now? One thing, the chemical drugs, are addictive. The other things are enjoyable. One will addict everyone because they're addictive. The other only leads to addiction-like behaviors in the context of say, random interval operant conditioning, if you actually enjoy the thing intrinsically first and are of the fairly small subset of that subset that is predisposed to behavioral addictive behaviors.
You're right in an important sense. There's not a complete difference in outcome between direct manipulation of wanting with drugs and using enjoyable stimuli in some form of unethical non-consensual conditioning program (aka advertising). It is one of many scales of magnitude and a lot of abstraction but that's still bad.
What I am trying to get across, and what I'd hoped all the conditionals and premises I laid out in my original comment made clear, is an additional consideration:
Screens are not drugs. They are not somehow uniquely and magically addictive (like drugs actually are). The multi-media is not the problem and not the device to be regulated. The corporate structure and motivations are the problem. This issue literally applies to any possible human perception even outside of screens. Sport fishing itself is random interval operant conditioning in the same way that corporations use. And frankly, with a boat, it's just as big of a money and time sink.
We should not be making laws regulating screens themselves because we think screens are more addictive than, say, an enjoyable day out on the lake. They're not. You could condition a blind person over the radio with just audio. The radio is not the problem and radios are not uniquely addictive like drugs.
I am saying it's important not to think of screens as the problem. The problem is the corporations' behavior and scale. That's a big difference in terms of the legislation used to mitigate the problem and the people to which it will apply. The Digital Markets Act in the EU is a good template to follow with it only applying to very large incorporated entities acting as gatekeepers.
Addictive drugs directly increase wanting via directly activating the downstream targets of dopaminergic populations which predict the valence of stimuli and control of wanting and motivation. By taking a chemically addictive drug you don't even have to enjoy the stimuli related to it. You will still be conditioned to want it and be motivated to re-experience the stimuli surrounding it.
This is vastly different in mechanism and result than simply seeing or hearing a screen. These things cannot directly increase incentive salience regardless of actual valance of the stimuli. You have to actually enjoy the thing and the experiences to form habits.
Do you see the difference now? One thing, the chemical drugs, are addictive. The other things are enjoyable. One will addict everyone because they're addictive. The other only leads to addiction-like behaviors in the context of say, random interval operant conditioning, if you actually enjoy the thing intrinsically first and are of the fairly small subset of that subset that is predisposed to behavioral addictive behaviors.