Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called on Congress on Monday to pass a law requiring a warning label for adolescents on all social media platforms. It is encouraging to see the Biden administration highlight the problem and seek congressional action, but a warning label is not enough.
Evidence is strong that social media use harms children, and parents need all the tools necessary to protect their families. States, including Florida, Georgia, and Utah, have passed strong new laws to help parents, and Congress should follow their lead.
The net benefit of adult social media use is debatable, but the impact on children is clearly bad. Between 2011 and 2019, when children gained access to social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, teenage depression doubled, and emergency room admissions for girls between 10 and 14 quadrupled.
Studies show that adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media are more than twice as likely to suffer from anxiety and depression than those who do not. Three hours a day may sound like a lot until you also realize that the average among adolescents is almost five hours.
The algorithms that power social media platforms are designed to monopolize user attention with no concern about what harm such infatuation can do. Meta’s internal research on Instagram users found that its product made the lives of teenage girls worse. “Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” one memo noted. Meta then did nothing to fix the problem.
With Silicon Valley tech companies more interested in exploiting their users’ attention and data than protecting them from harm, state governments have begun to step in. Utah requires social media platforms to verify users’ age and then further requires those under 18 to get their parents’ permission before creating an account. The law also mandates that, as a default, parents can monitor the content their children see on a platform, as well as what they post.
Florida went a step further, banning social media use by children under 14 and requiring parental permission for those aged 14 and 15. Utah also created a default curfew for all social media use for those under 18 between 10:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m.
Murthy said a surgeon general warning would help limit children’s social media use, citing a poll of Latino parents showing that 76% said they would try to monitor their child’s usage if social media came with such a warning.
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Raising parents’ awareness of the harms of social media is a worthy goal, but parents, at the same time, should be given the tools to monitor, control, and limit their children’s social media use. Parents have busy lives filled with technology they do not always have time to master. By requiring children to get their parents’ permission to create an account and giving parents the default tools to track and limit what their children see, Florida and Utah are bringing much-needed supervision where it is sorely missing.
Many parents are choosing not to give their children smartphones. Instructively, this is a popular option among Big Tech moguls who own social media platforms. They, more than anyone else, are privy to the dangerous ingredients in social media. Many parents may not wish to go so far and want their children to connect online. Social media reforms championed by Florida and Utah are a model Congress should pursue to make that possible with greater safety.
