Dr. Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General of the United States, declared on Monday that he will advocate for social media companies to include a warning label alerting parents to the potential risks to their adolescent children’s mental health when they use the platforms.
In a piece that appeared in the opinion section of The New York Times on Monday, Dr. Murthy stated that a warning label would convey to parents the important message that social media is not safe.
“Why is it that we have failed to respond to the harms of social media when they are no less urgent or widespread than those posed by unsafe cars, planes or food?” Dr. Murthy wrote. “These harms are not a failure of willpower and parenting; they are the consequence of unleashing powerful technology without adequate safety measures, transparency or accountability.”
According to studies cited by Dr. Murthy, youths who use social media for more than three hours a day are far more likely to experience mental health issues, and 46% of teenagers claim that using social media makes them feel worse about their bodies.
An autumn Gallup study of over 1,500 teenagers revealed that American youths spend an average of 4.8 hours a day on social media sites like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.
“The platforms are designed to maximize how much time we all spend on them,” he said. “It’s one thing to do that to an adult, and another thing to do it to a child, whose impulse control is still developing, whose brain is at a sensitive phase of development.”
Dr. Murthy admitted that there was still more research to be done on how social media use affects teenage mental health. Nevertheless, he advised parents to keep gadgets out of the dining room and to start imposing limitations on their kids’ usage of social media right away.
Congress agreed in 1965 to mandate that all cigarette packaging shipped in the US have a warning that consuming the product “may be hazardous to your health,” following a groundbreaking report from the Surgeon General. About 42% of adult Americans smoked cigarettes every day when the warning labels first came out; by 2021, that number had fallen to 11.5 percent.
Congress must approve legislation before warning labels on social media may be imposed, and none has been proposed in either chamber as of yet.
