A hot potato: The US Surgeon General wants social media to carry the same kind of health warning labels as cigarettes and alcohol. Dr. Vivek Murthy has called on Congress to apply labels to the sites and apps that alert users to the potential mental health harms they cause.
Murthy cited research in his op-ed for the New York Times that shows social media has been a major contributor to the mental health crisis among young people.
One of the articles, a 2019 American Medical Association study published in JAMA, showed that teens who spend three hours a day on social media face double the risk of anxiety and depression symptoms. As of the summer of 2023, the average daily use in this age group was 4.8 hours.
It would be up to Congress to pass a bill that would put warning labels on social media platforms. Murthy says such a label would regularly remind parents and adolescents that social media has not been proved safe.
There have long been studies on the negative effects social media has on young users, from online harassment, increased exposure to problematic content, and the impact it can have on body image.
In 2023, the American Psychological Association (APA) issued a health advisory regarding adolescent social media usage, but probably the most famous incident was the leaked Facebook documents that showed the company had spent years examining the effects Instagram has on younger users' mental health. "We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls," read a slide from one Facebook internal presentation in 2019. "Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse," researchers said in another presentation from March 2020.
Facebook defended the report at the time, but it still put the brakes on the Instagram for Kids project.
Would Surgeon General warning labels on social media even make a difference? Murthy seems to think so. He notes that after Congress mandated warning labels on tobacco products in 1965, it increased the public's awareness of the problem and changed their behavior.
In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized to parents at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing who said that Instagram contributed to their children's suicides or exploitation. "I'm sorry for everything you've all gone through," Zuckerberg said when asked whether he would apologize to the parents directly. "It's terrible. No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered."