A new report from U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy outlines how often compulsive social media use by children and teens leads to a variety of negative health outcomes, including declining mental health, lack of sleep, exposure to harassment and other problems. As platforms like Instagram and TikTok become ubiquitous with 95% of kids using some app, the report calls on parents, children, tech companies and, crucially, policymakers to take action.
There is broad agreement on the need for federal regulation, with even industry groups and officials pushing for clear and generally applicable guardrails as a preferable alternative to patchy, 50 different kinds of state-level legislation or confusing or too-targeted policies that are attempting to wrangle specific companies.
But who should write these controls, and to what end? Lawmakers are woefully unprepared to regulate technologies that they can hardly understand and whose long-term repercussions they are unequipped to foresee and preempt (just look at the often embarrassing congressional hearings featuring policymakers stumbling around basic concepts). Industry has an alluring alternative: let people with deep expertise write the laws. Where might one find these people? Industry itself, and its lobbyists, of course. They would like that.
