What I've seen is that journalists often seem to think that if social scientists can measure something, it proves that it is real. A typical headline will be something like "Studies show that 29% of us are addicted to social media." What they miss is that these studies starts with researchers making value judgements, and those judgements aren't more legitimate because a researcher made them.
This kind of research doesn't answer the question "Is social media an addiction?" It tries to answer the question, "If you think social media is an addiction, how serious is the problem?" That's why you can create a satirical measure that answers the question "How serious is the problem of friend addiction?"
The addiction classification is especially difficult. Often we call something an addiction if someone routinely engages in behavior where the negatives outweigh the positives. But when there's no common standard of measurement between the pros and cons, another value judgement has to be made about how to weight the various consequences.