U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said Monday it is time to place a tobacco-style warning on social media platforms about “significant mental health harms” for adolescents, a major effort to crack down on websites that appear to increase rates of anxiety and make teens feel bad about their bodies.
Dr. Murthy said the warning, which requires congressional action, would make parents more likely to restrict or monitor their children’s activities online.
“The mental health crisis among young people is an emergency — and social media has emerged as an important contributor,” he wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times. “A surgeon general’s warning label, which requires congressional action, would regularly remind parents and adolescents that social media has not been proved safe.”
The average daily social media use among adolescents — those ages 10 to 19 — is almost five hours. Dr. Murthy said nearly half of adolescents report that social media makes them feel worse about their appearance and youths who spend at least three hours a day on social media face double the risk of anxiety and depression symptoms.
Dr. Murthy pointed to lessons from the crackdown on tobacco, which showed that warnings can alter behavior.
In the mid-1960s, Congress looked at evidence of a link between cigarettes and lung cancer and heart disease and required a standard warning: “Caution: Cigarette Smoking May Be Hazardous to Your Health.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre did not explicitly say whether President Biden would like Congress to enact the type of warning outlined by the surgeon general.
“We want to see a bipartisan approach to dealing with this issue of how to hold social media companies accountable,” she said.
Studies about social media’s impact on youths have produced mixed results. Some have found positive effects for children who feel marginalized and want to build bonds with a broader social community.
Yet “there’s definitely higher levels of anxiety, there’s definitely been episodes of folks feeling left out because they see what they’re not involved in,” said Dr. Leopoldo Pozuelo, the chair of psychiatry and psychology at the Cleveland Clinic.
Seeing posts about a party or social gathering can feed feelings of social isolation for those left out, chipping away at self-esteem.
“They all start to feed on each other,” Dr. Pozuelo said.
Spats used to be limited to those present at the time, but social media platforms allow incidents at school to be broadcast far and wide, raising the potential for harm.
Dr. Murthy’s push builds on a 19-page advisory he issued in May 2023 that warned of social media’s “profound risk” to young people because their brains are in a different stage of development from adults.
In his op-ed, Dr. Murthy pointed to parents who told him their child committed suicide after online bullying and students who said posts that shred their self-image or foster outrage outweigh the fun of social media.
Appearing on NBC’s “Today,” the surgeon general said he would delay social media use among children until “at least after middle school.”
“I would create tech-free zones in their day to protect sleep, in-person interaction and physical activity,” he said. “That could look like not allowing technology at the dinner table when you’re eating together. It could look like taking technology away one hour before bedtime and then giving it back to kids in the morning. But we need to do this. It’s not easy — trust me, I know this.”
The surgeon general said warnings should not supplant other measures. In his op-ed, he said social media companies should be required to provide independent researchers with data about their impact on youths and Congress should pursue legislation that protects against harassment, abuse and exploitation online or prevents platforms from collecting sensitive data about youths.
Dr. Pozuelo said Dr. Murthy is right to put guardrails around vulnerable populations and spur a conversation about further measures.
“We need data that is clean, that is true from the social media platforms. So we can look at this prospectively, we can be more proactive instead of reactive,” Dr. Pozuelo said.
Major social media companies, including TikTok and Facebook’s Meta, did not respond to inquiries from The Washington Times about the push for a warning on their platforms.
Congressional leaders did not signal whether they would take up Dr. Murthy’s drive for a mandated warning, though members of both political parties say the pandemic fueled a mental health crisis among youths and that shaming, peer pressure or inappropriate content on social media is making it worse.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, Tennessee Republican, thanked Dr. Murthy for sounding the alarm and promoting the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill she co-sponsored with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut Democrat. The act aims to reduce online harm by forcing companies to design their platforms and algorithms to keep harmful material from reaching children and to empower parents.
“We must continue to bring attention to the harmful impact that social media has on our children,” Ms. Blackburn wrote Monday on X.
Some states have banned minors from creating social media accounts, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized to parents who said one of his platforms, Instagram, contributed to suicides and other adverse events.
Mr. Biden signed a bill that would force TikTok’s Chinese parent company to sell off its interest in the platform to continue operating in the U.S. The debate over TikTok, however, is largely centered on national security and privacy versus the social and mental effects of social media.
“Our young people are experiencing an unprecedented mental health crisis,” Ms. Jean-Pierre said. “We’re going to continue to look at a range of actions.”
Dr. Murthy said the U.S. should respond to social media’s harms with the same urgency as the dangers posed by unsafe vehicles, planes and food.
“There is no seatbelt for parents to click, no helmet to snap in place, no assurance that trusted experts have investigated and ensured that these platforms are safe for our kids,” he wrote. “There are just parents and their children, trying to figure it out on their own, pitted against some of the best product engineers and most well-resourced companies in the world.”
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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