WARNING: You Won’t Like This New Label
Surgeon General wants warning labels for social media: We already have ’em for booze and cigarettes. So why not Instagram and TikTok?
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has a New York Times op-ed out today that calls for Congress “to require a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.” Such a label would serve to “regularly remind parents and adolescents that social media has not been proved safe.”
“Faced with high levels of car-accident-related deaths in the mid- to late 20th century, lawmakers successfully demanded seatbelts, airbags, crash testing and a host of other measures that ultimately made cars safer,” Murthy reasons. “This January the [Federal Aviation Administration] grounded about 170 planes when a door plug came off one Boeing 737 Max 9 while the plane was in the air. And the following month, a massive recall of dairy products was conducted because of a listeria contamination that claimed two lives,” he notes. “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?”
This is a flawed line. Of course, a body panel coming off a plane mid-flight, endangering passengers, is much more urgent than a teenager using social media and sometimes experiencing emotional harms from it. Of course, car crashes, which remain the second largest accident-fatality category in the U.S. and claim some 40,000 lives per year, are a more pressing harm worth solving via seatbelts and airbags than preteens feeling bad about themselves after scrolling for too long.
“For too long, we have placed the entire burden of managing social media on the shoulders of parents and kids, despite the fact that these platforms are designed by some of the most talented engineers and designers in the world to maximize the amount of time that our kids spend on them,” Murthy told CNN last year after he issued a 25-page advisory hitting many of the same notes as today’s Times op-ed. He is correct that social media companies devote teams of engineers to optimizing the algorithm to push people to use the service more, but he’s incorrect to frame it as a David and Goliath situation in which parents cannot be expected to do the hard work of actual parenting.
Of course, some suggestions Murthy has are totally anodyne: schools should get phones out of the classroom, parents should get phones away fr
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