Do you find social media addictive? If so then, you might be up for a multi-million dollar pay-out.

That’s what a woman in Los Angeles was awarded this week after a jury found that Instagram’s owner Meta and YouTube had made their products deliberately addictive. The plaintiff — named only as Kaley G.M. — was awarded a total of $3 million.

Reaction to the case has been predictably polarized. On the one hand endless potential plaintiffs (and of course lawyers) will spot a payout bonanza. They will claim that they have also suffered anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia and other mental health conditions as a result of spending too much time online.

On the other side there are free-marketeers bemoaning that this is all just going to be one big hustle and that there is little else to see here. They say that judgements like that in Los Angeles will not just punish tech companies like Meta and Google. They claim that this in turn will prevent the big tech companies from making further AI innovations which may yet cure everything from the common cold to cancer.

In fact all this misses the much bigger point.

Kaley G.M.’s case succeeded because the plaintiff was a child at the time. And her lawyers showed that the big tech companies deliberately targeted their products to be addictive to children. “They knew” said the attorney for the plaintiff. “They targeted the children.”

Yet every parent in America knows this. And they know it because every parent in America lives with it. And not just every parent. Every adult.

Does anyone reading this think that they need to spend more time on social media? Does anyone reading this read more long books now than they did a decade ago?

I doubt it — and all the research backs up that fact. If we adults are honest, most of us are addicted to our phones and devices, or at least have an unhealthy relationship with them.

All of us have the experience of speaking with a friend who suddenly gets lost in their device. Or discovers during what would once have been a conversation that something has pinged and someone is showing us a video they would once have simply described to us.

Plenty of us who grew up in the pre-social media world have fallen into this rabbit-hole. We start to look at Instagram only to discover that minutes — sometimes hours — have passed. The thing we were searching for sends us to a picture of beautiful holiday destination, a cat doing something amusing, or a meerkat being house-trained.

Of course we know that platforms like YouTube are set up to get us hooked. They push videos our way that are based on what the algorithm knows we are interested in. Where once we might have watched a film or a documentary, now whole evenings can be lost skipping from one recommended snippet to another. And that’s just adults.

There’s still too little recognition of the fact that if this is the case with adults, the situation is infinitely worse for children. If adults find it hard, imagine what it is like for people who never knew a world where if you didn´t know something you had to look it up and sometimes not find the answer. Or when if you couldn’t remember a name you just had to shrug and move on.

All the research shows that what we as adults find addictive is, for the developing brain, absolute crack cocaine. The iPhone and its attendant joys have brought huge benefits.

But as the work of Jonathan Haidt and others has shown, the devices which most teenagers now have in their hands carry the most profound toxins.

For young people — and teenagers in particular — the way in which these platforms make you compare yourself not just with your peer group but with the whole of the rest of the world has an ability to be literally soul-destroying.

Platforms like Instagram are especially damaging. We know that. In fact the evidence about certain platforms is so conclusive that people who work in tech are famously the parents who most carefully limit the usage by their own children.

As a society we really haven’t even begun to reckon with this technology. It has developed at such a pace that it is hardly surprising that parents and law-makers are left behind.

Some people now compare this to the way in which big tobacco pushed their products in the past. But even back in those days, before all the health negatives associated with smoking were known, we had rules about selling tobacco to children.

There is still too little acceptance of the harm that certain platforms do to everyone. But there should at least be a serious effort to reckon with how dangerous they can be for children.

The problem is that is here that the buck gets passed. The tech companies say that they are merely providing a product. It is up to the consumer how they use it. Parents often blame schools. Teachers blame parents. And then everyone blames the tech companies again.

Since politicians can’t be trusted to legislate on such an issue, it is natural that some people — particularly parents — will hope that the courts can correct all of this. As though a few punitive fines will force the platforms to try to make their products less addictive.

But the truth is that there is no single answer to this problem. And there is no single court, plaintiff or platform that is going to solve this for us.

Yes Big tech needs to take a greater responsibility. And legislators need to realize that existing legislation like Section 230 is wholly unfit for purpose. That already allows social media companies to get away with things that traditional media companies would never be allowed to get away with.

But in the end the answer lies in all of our hands. And if you doubt that, then — after finishing this sentence — just register what your brain is suggesting your thumbs flick to next.