The harm social media is doing to America’s children gained momentum this week from Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. There has been a call for warning labels on social media platforms. If the news gives you déjà vu, that’s understandable. Just a year ago, the same surgeon general Dr Issued a lengthy advisory About social media and young people’s mental health. But as the Surgeon General’s new call to action, a guest essay published by The New York Times, draws our attention, a warning label alone will not rescue young people from the harmful effects of social media.
Several states have enacted legislation to address the harm social media has on young people, and this month New York Governor Cathy Hochul “Addictive” Social Media Algorithm Banned. Perhaps the strongest proposal is the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which has been passed around Capitol Hill for years but could finally go up for a vote soon. One of the big things this comprehensive children’s online safety law offers is a mandate to give parents more tools to manage their children’s online privacy and experiences on certain platforms. And even those tools may not be enough.
The new urgency to protect children against social media threatens to distract us from the larger question of how we can protect everyone online.
After all, the same algorithm Makes teenagers miserable That serves up an endless stream of content Their self-image tends to suffer is Bad for adults too. And the same unchecked data collection that powers those algorithms will continue to harm adult Internet users, even as we find ways to make children safer. The fact that a handful of giant tech companies like Meta have become so powerful suggests that social media is the real solution to the problem May have more to do with breaking monopolies than applying warning labels.
“It’s strange that we use children as a peg to solve problems,” said Aaron McKee, Electronic Frontier Foundation director of free speech and transparency cases. “Any kind of effort that just involves children—say, children’s privacy or harm to children—is less inclusive, because these harms, they don’t have age gaps.”
And yet, we use children as pegs to solve all kinds of problems online. The tradition dates back to the early days of the Internet: The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) was enacted in 1998 to regulate how websites collect data on users under the age of 13. Kids were protected, but data collection for the rest of us was left largely unchecked. The United States does not yet have a comprehensive data privacy law, although more laws to protect children continue to gain ground.
The past year has seen several policymakers push their plans to protect children online The advisory statue, issued last year, accompanied an executive order by President Joe Biden that highlighted an “unprecedented youth mental health crisis” caused by the Internet. Even then, Kossa was gaining steam in the Senate. The bill was first introduced in 2022 and would hold platforms accountable for their impact on children and give parents more ways to control how their children use these tools. KOSA and its house equivalent Now there are enough votes to passIt’s unclear how popular it will be, though with young people.
There’s a good chance that COSA will turn into congressional action that Murthy needs to have real teeth for his warning label.
For decades, surgeon generals have issued warnings about everything from tobacco and alcohol to violent video games and loneliness, but without the introduction of new policies they amount to mere lip service that forces people to change their behavior. Saying people under 21 shouldn’t drink and making it illegal for people under 21 to drink are two completely different things. If it is signed into law, KOSA will introduce a slate of new rules, including a mandate for platforms to prevent harm to users under 17. The law will force affected platforms to limit personalized recommendations and features that encourage young people to spend more time On them it doesn’t solve these problems for the rest of us.
Even if this new law fails and the Surgeon General’s social media warning label never becomes a reality, there are several grassroots movements aimed at limiting the negative effects of social media on children. Along with the publication of the book is now one of the most prominent Anxious generation Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and professor at NYU. Based on the themes he explores A Broad Atlantic feature published last year Arguing that the introduction of smartphones and Instagram has created a crisis in youth mental health, Haidt’s new book spent 11 weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller list and Pointing to dozens of organizations Try to reverse the phone-based childhood trend. If the government can’t solve the social media problem, these groups seem to argue, then maybe parents and schools will.
What we won’t know until this happens is how much limiting access to social media sites will improve lives. something, including the ACLU, argue that blocking access to websites or platforms simply amounts to censorship, and that we should focus on providing tools for responsible use rather than checks on tech companies or outright bans to parents. Others worry that a warning label will actually have the opposite of the intended effect.
“We have certainly seen cases where warning labels, such as ‘claims’ have been added to media images depicting retouched or ultra-thin models, actually bad subject (eg, body image) they’re trying to address,” Jacqueline Nessi, a psychologist and professor at Brown University, said. Techno Sapiens wrote in its newsletter on Tuesday. “I think we run the same risk here.”
And let’s not forget what young people think. Social media is not necessarily negative for people under 18, just as it is not necessarily bad for all of society. It helps young people find friends and be creative. It might even be fun. inside A 2023 Pew study80 percent of teens said social media helped them feel more connected to their peers, and 71 percent said it helped them through difficult times.
“Kids are saying, they want products, they want benefits, but they don’t want harm,” said Camille Carlton, director of policy at the Center for Humane Technology. “They don’t want to feel like they can’t put it down. They want balance in their lives.”
You can probably say the same for the rest of us.
