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Key Takeaways
- U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy wrote in a New York Times essay published Monday that warnings labels should be added to social media platforms to help protect children.
- Murthy wrote that mounting evidence shows that social media is actively harming teenagers across the U.S.
- Citing cigarettes, seatbelts, and food recalls, Murthy wrote that the government and country can act quickly when faced with a safety issue, but for some reason hasn’t acted yet on social media.
Social media platforms could soon come with warning labels similar to those on cigarettes and tobacco products if Congress takes the advice of Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, who wrote in a New York Times essay published Monday that he believes it’s time to do something about the companies and platforms that are harming children across the U.S.
Adding a warning label to the platforms would require action from Congress, and it’s unclear what form the label would take on a digital product. Last year, the Surgeon General issued a 19-page advisory about the mental health effects of social media.
Growing Evidence of Social Media’s Negative Impacts
Murthy cited a number of studies in Monday’s essay that connected high social media use to a greater risk of anxiety and depression symptoms among teenagers, along with self-esteem issues. A Gallup poll from last October found that half of the teenagers surveyed said they spent at least four hours a day on social media platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and X, with the average figure around 4.8 hours per day.
The addition of a warning label would “regularly remind parents and adolescents that social media has not been proved safe,” Murthy wrote.
He wrote that action from Congress is necessary to protect 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.”
A warning label is just one governmental step that Murthy said the U.S. needs to take to fix its social media problem. He wrote that the companies themselves should be forced to be more open with their data and practices, and schools and parents also need to do a better job of setting collective boundaries around when and where social media and cell phones are allowed.
What Effects Could a Warning Label Have?
Murthy compared the warning label he is calling for to the labels that were introduced onto tobacco products like cigarettes in the 1960s after then-Surgeon General Luther Terry issued a report on the health hazards that come with cigarette smoking.
He also cited other regulatory and safety landmarks like seatbelts, helmets, and food recalls as examples of other industries that face more governmental pressures to protect consumers than social media companies have traditionally faced.
“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,” Murthy 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.”
The percentage of U.S. adults who smoked daily was 11.5% in 2021, down significantly from around 42% when the labels were introduced in 1965, the Times reported.
Stocks of social media giants like Snapchat parent Snap (SNAP), Instagram and Facebook parent Meta Platforms (META), and YouTube parent Alphabet (GOOGL) were down slightly in premarket trading Monday.