This week, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called on Congress to require warning labels on social media apps. The labels would be similar to cigarette labels that warn about lung cancer and other health concerns. But as someone who has studied the effects of social media for more than a decade, I worry that this call will probably do more harm than good.
There is a lack of evidence to support warning labels. Murthy acknowledges that there is no causal evidence for the harms of social media. That’s true. A recent meta-analysis of experimental studies found little evidence that reducing social media time improves mental health. But Murthy argues that there is strong evidence of correlations of adverse effects. But this is wrong. A recent meta-analysis has revealed that the correlations between social media use and mental health or attention are weak at best and probably statistical noise, or “shit.” Moreover, contrary to popular belief, social media time does not reduce real sociality. Last year, the National Academy of Sciences released a report highlighting that the evidence for harm is weak and inconclusive. Indeed, scholars are still debating the effects of social media, but at this point there is no reassuring evidence to support the Surgeon General’s call.
In the absence of hard evidence linking social media use to adverse outcomes, the warning label requirement is unlikely to survive court scrutiny. The First Amendment does not allow the government to require private entities to broadcast government messages, in this case with warning labels. In extreme cases, where the evidence of harm is clear, such as in the case of tobacco, an exception may be made.
This issue came up 14 years ago when the government tried to restrict the sale of action video games to minors, claiming that video games were the cause of school shootings. The burden was on the government to prove a compelling government interest in restricting minors’ free speech. The Supreme Court ultimately rejected these efforts because there was no evidence to support a link between games and mass murders. If Congress enacts the law the Surgeon General seeks, it would be a waste of the public’s time and money to repeat the same exercise in court. There is simply no research to back up this effort in the inevitable legal battles.
Moreover, warning labels are almost certain to attract young people to social media rather than help them avoid it. “Explicit Lyrics” stickers on music are the product of a moral panic against rock music in the 1980s, but they have only succeeded in increasing explicit lyrics in music, as the stickers themselves attract youth sales.
Even if social media turns out to be largely safe, people may rightly wonder what harm the label could do. Like all moral panics, indulging in panic about social media distracts society’s attention from the real concerns facing young people. The mental health crisis in the United States is not specific to teenagers. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the suicide rate among middle-aged adults is higher than among teenagers. Focusing on teenagers and trying to blame their problems on technology misses the fact that this is a family crisis. In fact, analysis shows that many young people’s mental health problems are caused by parental problems. Young people often react to family stress, the death of a parent by suicide or drug overdose, or physical or mental abuse of the teenager by a parent. Unfortunately, policymakers have been slow to recognize this and have stuck to blaming technology.
Unfortunately, the Surgeon General has historically been a driver of moral panic. In the 1980s, the Surgeon General famously warned that games like Pac-Man and Asteroids were a pressing social problem. The Surgeon General was proven wrong then and is now. The good news is that according to the CDC, youth suicide rates in 2022 went down without government intervention. In contrast, adult suicide rates went up. If we really want to understand young people’s mental health, we need to start focusing on what’s happening to their parents. In the meantime, let’s hope that the decline in youth suicide rates in 2022 becomes a long-term pattern.
Chris Ferguson is a professor of psychology at Stetson University in Florida and author of Madness, How People Make Bad Situations Worse and Catastrophe!
