Even the introduction of Irresistable [0] is enough to want to keep your kids off social media — alleged is that Steve Jobs didn't allow his own kids to use iPads/tech in their bedrooms.
So, I'll start off by saying I recommend a different approach than what I often see, with book recommendations.
Usually there's this hope that there's one book that's going to be THE book that kicks your social media addiction. Like imagine a Harvard psychiatrist wrote a book called "Social Media: The Evidence Against It." You read it, you raise a hand to your forehead saying "My God" or whatever and then you delete Twitter/Insta/Facebook forever. I don't think that's realistic.
What works however - and it really does work! - is to read a series of these books that really force your attention on to these abstractions (social media, addictiveness, your own relationship to it) and gently, gradually, distances you from them. It's not a one-book solution. It's multiple books, which are each slowly reshaping how you think about the Internet and how you use it, a little piece at a time.
I think the book cited above, "Irresistible", looks great, and I plan to read it (though I have not).
The ones I have read are: Smith's "Traffic", which isn't so much about addiction per se, but about how the game for traffic is played, by people who played it, the incentives for it; "Meme Wars" by Donovan, about memes and their effects on culture & politics (kind of adjacent to Reeve's "Black Pill", which I also read); and then multiple others which I won't cite here, which just made me think more about my relationship to culture, the good parts which I wanted to amplify vs. the bad parts of "mindlessly scrolling on the Internet."
I also thought Netflix's "The Social Dilemma" was good, for shining a spotlight on your relationship to these platforms and how you relate to them.
Note that you could pass on all of these books and honestly that would be okay with me. In a way that most important thing is to read a book that really immerses you in the mechanics of what you're doing when you're on tech platforms and the negative aspects of that (which I think we all know - spending too long on them, wasting time, negative self-image, etc). Over time, reading books like that release you from the grip of social media & the algorithms. If nothing else, they loosen it, which is helpful.
> read a series of books that really force your attention on to these abstractions
yes yes yes
as if the wet organic neutral net would "learn" a new model from the presented material and distill a solid new network to recognize the patterns in the wild.
and rarely is the a single outstanding meta book that already "wham" uploads such a net it into our little sensing apparatus.
asking for a friend...