This week, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called on Congress to require warning labels on social media apps. These warning labels would be similar to those on cigarettes warning about lung cancer and other health concerns. However, as someone who has researched social media effects for over a decade, I worry that this call will likely do more harm than good.
The evidence to support warning labels is lacking. Murthy has acknowledged there is no cause-and-effect evidence for social media harms. That is correct. In a recent meta-analysis of experimental studies, I found there was little evidence that reducing social media time improved mental health. However, Murthy claims there is strong correlational evidence for negative effects. But this is wrong. Several recent meta-analyses have clarified that correlations between social media use and mental health or attention are weak at best, and probably statistical noise; what we call “crud.” Further, contrary to common belief, social media time does not reduce real-life socialization. Just last year the National Academy of Sciences released a report highlighting that evidence for harm is weak and inconclusive. Scholars are still debating social media effects, to be sure, but at present there’s no encouraging body of evidence to support the surgeon general’s call.
Because there is no good evidence linking social media use to negative outcomes, a call for warning labels is unlikely to survive court scrutiny. The First Amendment does not allow the government to require private entities to broadcast the government’s message, in this case by carrying a warning label. In some extreme cases, if the evidence of harm is clear, as it was for cigarettes, exceptions may be made.
This came up 14 years ago when the government wanted to regulate the sale of action video games to minors, arguing the video games caused school shootings. The burden of proof was on the government to document its compelling interest to limit minors’ speech rights. The Supreme Court ultimately struck down such efforts because the evidence did not support a link between games and mass homicides. Were Congress to enact the law the surgeon general is calling for, it would probably be a waste of the public’s time and money setting up a repeat performance in the courts. The research simply isn’t there to support this effort during the inevitable court challenge.
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Further, far from helping youth avoid social media, warning labels would almost certainly attract youth to social media. The “explicit lyrics” sticker affixed to music, the product of a moral panic over rock music in the 1980s, has only managed to increase explicit lyrics in music as the sticker itself attracts sales from youth.
People might reasonably ask what the harm is in the labels, even if it turns out that social media is largely safe. As with all moral panics, indulging a panic about social media will distract society from real concerns youth face. The mental health crisis in the United States is not teen specific. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide rates among middle-aged adults are higher than among teens. By focusing on teens and trying to blame their problems on technology, we’re missing that this is a crisis of families. Indeed, analyses suggest that many youth mental health issues are downstream from their parents’ problems. Youth are often reacting to family stress, parental deaths due to suicide or drug overdoses, or parents physically or emotionally abusing their teens. Unfortunately, policy makers have been slow to recognize this, obsessed instead with blaming technology.
Unfortunately, the surgeon general has historically been an engine of moral panics. Famously, in the 1980s the surgeon general warned that games such as Pac-Man and Asteroids were a pressing social problem. The surgeon general proved to be wrong then and is wrong now. The good news is, without government intervention, youth suicide rates went down in 2022, according to the CDC. By contrast, adult suicide rates went up. If we really want to understand youth mental health, we need to start focusing on what is happening with their parents. In the meantime, let us hope that the decline in the youth suicide rates in 2022 becomes a long-term pattern.
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Chris Ferguson is a professor of psychology at Stetson University in Florida and author of “How Madness Shaped History” and “Catastrophe! The Psychology of How Good People Make Bad Situations Worse.”
