U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy believes the dangers posed by social media to adolescents are so pronounced that extraordinary measures are needed to protect their developing brains and psyches.
This week, in an opinion column he wrote for The New York Times, Murthy recommended that social media companies be required to add warning labels to their platforms, similar to the warnings that have long been mandated on cigarette boxes and chewing tobacco tins.
Murthy says the research about the detrimental effect of social media on the mental health of teens is alarming enough to justify such a warning. He cited two findings in particular: the excessive amount of time that adolescents spend on social media (an average of 4.8 hours a day) and the correlation between that and a significantly increased risk of mental health problems, such as anxiety and depression.
The warning labels would be intended to foster greater public awareness, in the hopes that parents and the teens themselves would pay attention and adopt some changes in how much time the young people spend with Facebook, TikTok an
Murthy doesn’t pretend that warning labels by themselves would be enough to deal with the crisis, just like tobacco product labels were only part of a larger strategy to reduce the prevalence of smoking.
Thus, he continues to advocate for congressional action to “shield young people from online harassment, abuse and exploitation and from exposure to extreme violence and sexual content that too often appears in algorithm-driven feeds.”
Just as importantly, he says that parents, teachers and others in society have a major role to play. He wants schools to adopt phone-free policies. And he wants parents to set limits on not only social media usage but cellphones, too. Children, he writes, should not have access to social media platforms before they are middle-school age, and their phone use should not be allowed around bedtime, meals and other social gatherings. The addiction that people, not just children, have to their smartphones and other electronic devices can cause sleep deprivation and a lessened ability to interact with people face-to-face.
Most parents seem to understand that social media has some real downsides for their offspring, but they struggle what to do about the problem. Those who raise their children with little to no access to smartphones and social media report positive results for their grades and their health, but these families are always going to be a statistical anomaly in a world saturated with electronic devices and increasingly robust software applications.
A more realistic option, and it’s one that Murthy advocates, is for parents to band together with other families in their school, sports and social groups to agree to limits that all will follow. That way, no parent will have to feel the pressure of children who complain that none of their friends or classmates have restrictions such as these. If parents whose families interact regularly can agree to shared rules and stick with them, the less friction there will be regarding those rules.
These kinds of voluntary restrictions will do more to reduce the risk from social media than any kind of government regulation, including warning labels. If the labels, however, prompt more parents to take the dangers seriously, they would be worth trying.
Tim Kalich, Greenwood Commonwealth
