In an extraordinary move, the U.S. Surgeon General has warned that social media provides a “meaningful risk of harm to children.”
“Our children have become unknowing participants in a decades-long experiment,” Vivek Murthy tweeted this morning, as he announced his latest advisory. “And while there is more we have to learn about the full impact, we know enough now to take action and protect our kids.”
The stats in Murthy’s advisory are quite alarming. Adolescents who spend at least three hours a day on social media—and the average in the U.S. is 3.5 hours for eighth- and 10th-graders, according to the advisory—“face double the risk of mental health problems including experiencing symptoms of depression and anxiety.” Almost half of 13- to 17-year-olds say social media makes them feel worse.
The Surgeon General’s advisory is clear that we don’t yet understand the full impact of social media on developing brains, but points to research that suggests the negative effects are particularly pronounced at that phase of life:
“Frequent social media use may be associated with distinct changes in the developing brain in the amygdala (important for emotional learning and behavior) and the prefrontal cortex (important for impulse control, emotional regulation, and moderating social behavior), and could increase sensitivity to social rewards and punishments. As such, adolescents may experience heightened emotional sensitivity to the communicative and interactive nature of social media.”
Murthy’s advisory does highlight some of social media’s potential benefits for young people—access to more diverse peer groups than they might find offline; support for marginalized groups; outlets for creativity. But it also calls on lawmakers to “pursue policies that further limit access—in ways that minimize the risk of harm—to social media for all children and adolescents.”
(Fun fact: The only major social media firm that’s actually doing this voluntarily is the much-reviled TikTok, which announced in March that it was instituting a one-hour daily time limit for those under 18. But I digress.)
The advisory also urges policymakers to develop “age-appropriate health and safety standards for technology platforms” and to “require a higher standard of data privacy for children and adolescents.” All this will be music to the ears of those senators who have introduced three competing bills that are all designed to protect kids on social media.
Murthy also has a list of things that the tech firms themselves should do, such as prioritizing user health in the design of their social media services. But critics of the industry don’t see that happening without legislation. “Congress must act to ensure social media platforms are held to standards of safety, transparency, accountability, and responsibility by legislation,” said Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, in response to the advisory.
Personally, I don’t think these are problems that can be entirely legislated away. Social media has become an integral part of how most people interact with and experience society, and the underlying issues—vanity, jealousy, bullying—are fundamentally societal. Parents and other caregivers have the most important role to play here, and Murthy’s advisory includes some useful albeit basic tips for them.
However, it is by now very clear that social media’s dopamine-driving mechanisms make those problems far worse, which means there should be technical, user-experience-related changes that can be made to mitigate the dangers. But what are they?
Are time limits the answer? Can age verification play a part without becoming a privacy nightmare for users in general? I’m very interested to know what viable ideas are out there, so if you have one, drop me an email—I’ll publish some of your feedback later this week.
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David Meyer
Data Sheet’s daily news section was written and curated by Andrea Guzman.
