You say “…board middle-aged housewives, children or the elderly,” is if it is just some hypothetical demographic of weak-minded people who can be subjected to this kind of manipulation. In fact, anyone is potentially susceptible to direct manipulation of affective (emotional) systems within the mind precisely because they leverage unconscious bias and preconceptions below the level of rational thought and emotional regulation. If you want evidence, look at the tobacco industry whose success did and still does rely upon mass manipulation to convince people to ignore obvious evidence of harms and compel customers to inhale a toxic, foul-smelling emission in order to feed an adiction.
While the social media and gaming app industry isn’t leveraging a direct physiological response like nicotine addition (or more properly, habitual amelioration of the effects of nicotine withdrawal), they are using evolved social mechanisms such as reciprocity, competition for hierarchial status, a need for collective acceptance, appealing the SEEKING affective system (i.e. ‘clickbait’), frenetic visual and auditory stimulus, and so forth to compel users to use their app or check in with their social media platform in a compulsive fashion that has the same neurological effects as physical and emotional addition. And the notion that this just works on weak-minded people or millenials is disproven by how wide of a demographic participates in these platforms and uses these apps. When you’ve seen a grown-ass man playing “Angry Birds” and refusing to be called to dinner it is pretty obvious just how much of a hold these applications have on the human psyche regardless of experience, and that is by intentional design.
Here is just a taste of what the tech industry is doing to apply cognitive science on compulsion and addiction to advancing their industry, and how it is being recognized as a problem and addressed by a few people.
Stranger