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17-06-2024
NEW YORK: The United States Surgeon General has called on Congress to require social media platforms to carry warning labels on their effects on young people’s lives, similar to those now mandatory on cigarette boxes.
In a Monday opinion piece in The New York Times, Dr Vivek Murthy said that social media is a contributing factor in the mental health crisis among young people.
“It is time to require a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents. A surgeon general’s warning label, which requires congressional action, would regularly remind parents and adolescents that social media has not been proved safe,” Murthy said. “Evidence from tobacco studies show that warning labels can increase awareness and change behavior.”
Murthy, who acts as the top government spokesperson on public health and is known as the nation’s doctor, said that the use of just a warning label would not make social media safe for young people, but would be a part of the steps needed.
Social media use is prevalent among young people, with up to 95 percent of those aged 13 to 17 saying that they use a social media platform, and more than a third saying that they use social media “almost constantly,” according to 2022 data from the Pew Research Center.
“Social media today is like tobacco decades ago: It’s a product whose business model depends on addicting kids. And as with cigarettes, a surgeon general’s warning label is a critical step toward mitigating the threat to children,” Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, an organization dedicated to ending marketing to children, said in a statement.
Getting the labels on social media platforms would take congressional action and it is not clear how quickly that might happen, even with apparent bipartisan unity around child safety online. Lawmakers have held multiple congressional hearings on child online safety and legislation is in the works. Still, the last federal law aimed at protecting children online was enacted in 1998, six years before Facebook’s founding.
“I am hoping that would be combined with a lot of other work that Congress has been trying to do to improve the safety and design and privacy of social media products,” said Dr Jenny Radesky, a developmental behavioral pediatrician at the University of Michigan and leader at the American Academy of Pediatrics. “Those two things would have to go hand in hand, because there’s so much that Congress can do to follow the steps of the United Kingdom and the European Union in passing laws that take into account what kids need when they’re interacting with digital products.”
Even with Congressional approval, warning labels would likely be challenged in the courts by tech companies.
“Putting a warning label on online speech isn’t just scientifically unsound, it’s at odds with the constitutional right to free speech,” said Adam Kovacevich, CEO of the tech industry policy group Chamber of Progress. “It’s surprising to see the US surgeon general attacking social media when teens themselves say it provides an important outlet for social connection.”
Last year, Murthy warned that there wasn’t enough evidence to show that social media is safe for children and teens. He said at the time that policymakers needed to address the harms of social media the same way they regulate things like car seats, baby formula, medication and other products children use.
To comply with federal regulation, social media companies already ban kids under 13 from signing up to their platforms but children have been shown to easily get around the bans, both with and without their parents’ consent. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
