Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy’s call to action comes as regulators scrutinize links between social media use and children’s mental health, amid scientific debate.
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy on Monday called for placing tobacco-style warning labels on social media to alert users that platforms can harm children’s mental health, escalating his warnings about the effects of online services such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
Murthy urged Congress to enact legislation requiring that social media platforms include a surgeon general’s warning to “regularly remind parents and adolescents that social media has not been proved safe,” in a New York Times opinion essay.
He cited evidence that adolescents who spend significant time on social media are at greater risk of experiencing anxiety and depression and that many young people say the platforms have worsened their body image. Murthy said warning labels, like those on tobacco and alcohol products, have been shown to change people’s behaviors.
The surgeon general’s call to action comes as regulators and legislators increasingly scrutinize links between social media use and children’s mental health, ushering in a wave of proposals to expand protections for children on the internet.
Lawmakers have likened Big Tech’s impact on kids to that of Big Tobacco, and urged swift action to counteract what they call a driving force in the youth mental health crisis.
Yet despite the bipartisan outcry, there’s still significant debate within the scientific community about the extent to which social media use may be causing mental health issues among children and teens.
Researchers and public officials have pushed to increase federal funding to study the topic, and criticized tech companies for not making more internal data on the matter available to the public.
But Murthy and other public officials argue there’s enough evidence to suggest social media can be unsafe, regardless of gaps in research.
“One of the most important lessons I learned in medical school was that in an emergency, you don’t have the luxury to wait for perfect information,” he wrote Monday. Murthy said the label would state that “social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.”
More than a dozen states have passed laws aimed at expanding guardrails around children’s use of social media, with some banning young children from accessing the sites altogether and requiring parent approval for teens to use them. But the laws have been challenged by tech industry groups, who argue that they are unconstitutional and violate users’ free speech rights. Several have since been halted by the courts.
On Capitol Hill, lawmakers are trying to advance a package of bills to require social platforms to vet whether their products pose harms to kids, and expand existing federal protections governing children’s online data. But the bills have yet to pass either chamber of Congress, and lawmakers face a dwindling window to act ahead of the 2024 elections.