Is it finally time to regulate social media the way we do alcohol, tobacco, and opioids?
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy — who has always focused on the mental and emotional health of his patients, the American people — certainly thinks so.
A longtime critic of unchecked youth use of social media, last year Dr. Murthy issued a Surgeon General’s Advisory which asked legislators to develop safety standards for social media use. Since that advisory was issued, there’s been little action beyond a round of hearings, so he’s gone further, calling this morning for a warning label for social media platforms, akin to those used for other products acknowledged to have potential dangers for developing minds — and for our society as a whole.
When we talked to Dr. Murthy in April, we discussed how social media has transformed the emotional and intellectual lives of young people, largely without any sort of plan and without much thought as to its potential long-term impact on kids’ mental health and their social interactions IRL. Young people already recognize that they spend too much time on social platforms, with majorities reporting that their use impacts their sleep and their interactions with family — even as those platforms have become an essential part of who they are.
For Dr. Murthy, that all means we need to take on the challenge of regulating social media as seriously as we’d take on any other potential public health threat.
[I]n the same way that we have taken aggressive approaches not just to tobacco but increasingly to opioids, and for any medication that either kids or adults use, we should at least be taking the same kind of rigorous approach when it comes to social media.
And we’re just not doing that. Even though there’s concern that’s being raised across the board from parents and from kids. The reason I issued a report on social media and youth mental health last year was because the most common question I was getting from parents was about social media and they wanted to know, “Is this safe for my kids?’
With his new proposal, the surgeon general looks to make it easier to get an answer to that question.
We hope our conversation (which also covered a couple of the biggest mental health issues facing American adults: the epidemic of loneliness and our societal failure to process the upheaval in gender roles) will give you some insight into the thinking behind Dr. Murthy’s latest call for action.
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This post was originally published on The.Ink.