Instagram is like a digital cigarette and box of chocolates that ‘encourages gluttony.’ How do you fix that?

Meta’s child-safety reckoning has drawn plenty of comparisons to Big Tobacco, but cigarettes were never designed to learn what each smoker wanted next.

But Instagram is.

Its recommendation algorithms learn what keeps users watching, infinite scroll eliminates the natural stopping point and autoplay serves up the next video without waiting to be asked.

Meta spent years making its platforms easier to keep using; now it may have to figure out how to make them easier to put down.

Now Big Social Media is facing its Big Tobacco moment in court as four states—California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey—try to prove that Meta designed Instagram and Facebook to keep young users hooked.

Meta says it faces theoretical penalties of $1.4 trillion, but the bigger question for the product itself is what happens if Meta is forced to restrict features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, notifications and recommendation systems: the same machinery critics call addictive is also part of what makes Instagram compelling to use.

These social-media cigarettes, in other words, could be getting a harsh new filter.

Larry Magid, a longtime online-safety advocate who has advised Meta on safety issues, thinks the cigarette comparison only goes so far.

For years, he preferred a different vice: chocolate.

Unlike cigarettes, Magid argues, social media can have real benefits.

Young people can use it to maintain friendships, find communities, organize around causes and access information.

He saw excessive use as a risk, but not evidence that the product itself was inherently harmful.

“The algorithms change the whole nature of it, and that’s where my chocolate metaphor went awry,” Magid told Fortune .

A chocolate bar, after all, doesn’t refill itself.