Warning: Believing The Surgeon General’s Social Media Warning May Be Hazardous To Teens’ Health

You may have heard that yesterday the Surgeon General of the US, Vivek Murthy, announced that Congress should mandate “Surgeon General warnings” on social media, saying that it is harmful to kids. Over at the Daily Beast I went into great detail about just how far from the actual science this suggestion is.

As with video games, the more research we get on teens and social media, the less accurate the moral panic appears. In the last few years alone, we’ve seen more than one organization reach the same conclusion. The National Academies of Sciences released a comprehensive report stating that a “review of the literature did not support the conclusion that social media causes changes in adolescent health at the population level.” The American Psychological Association released a similar report, concluding: “Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people.” Instead, it finds that when young people struggle with mental health, their online lives are often just a reflection of their offline lives.

Lots of other research has shown the same thing, yet Murthy’s call for health warnings never mentions all of this research that suggests social media is actually beneficial for many. Instead, he cites a few anecdotes of children who were bullied online. But bullying happened prior to social media, and we did not talk about putting health warnings on telephones or notepads or other forms of communication.

He does not address the potential for very real harm in following his suggestion. For example, a large meta-study in the Journal of Pediatrics, which similarly found no evidence to support social media being harmful to teen mental health, asserts that taking away places where kids can communicate without parental monitoring is the real cause of any teen mental health crisis. Based on that, social media might be one of the few remaining places that kids have a chance to be free from parental surveillance, and yet Murthy suggests it should be surveilled as well.

Hell, his recommendation even contradicts Murthy’s own report that he released a year ago. That report made it clear how helpful social media is for many kids:

Social media can provide benefits for some youth by providing positive community and connection with others who share identities, abilities, and interests. It can provide access to important information and create a space for self-expression. The ability to form and maintain friendships online and develop social connections are among the positive effects of social media use for youth. , These relationships can afford opportunities to have positive interactions with more diverse peer groups than are available to them offline and can provide important social support to youth. The buffering effects against stress that online social support from peers may provide can be especially important for youth who are often marginalized, including racial, ethnic, and sexual and gender minorities. , For example, studies have shown that social media may support the mental health and well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, transgender, queer, intersex and other youths by enabling peer connection, identity development and management, and social support. Seven out of ten adolescent girls of color report encountering positive or identity-affirming content related to race across social media platforms. A majority of adolescents report that social media helps them feel more accepted (58%), like they have people who can support them through tough times (67%), like they have a place to show their creative side (71%), and more connected to what’s going on in their friends’ lives (80%). In addition, research suggests that social media-based and other digitally-based mental health interventions may also be helpful for some children and adolescents by promoting help-seeking behaviors and serving as a gateway to initiating mental health care.

Yet, in Murthy’s statements this week, he completely ignores all of that evidence. He ignores any possibility of benefits from social media, not with evidence but with a few very limited anecdotes. These include concerns about his own two kids (who he notes are too young to be on social media anyway) and a few random stories of kids being bullied online.

But bullying has always existed. And yes, bullying online can take on more malignant forms due to scale and reach, but we should be focused on the specific conduct, not the clearly incorrect argument that social media is somehow inherently so harmful that it needs a warning.

What frustrates me most of all about this is that Murthy should know better than to base such big decisions on his own feels and anecdotes, especially when nearly all of the evidence disagrees with his beliefs. Murthy is supposed to be following the actual science, not getting swept up by moral panics.

In his op-ed, Murthy compares social media to cigarettes, but it’s utter nonsense to compare speech to something you actually consume. As we’ve noted in the past, social media is not lead paint, or cigarettes, or even chocolate. It’s speech.

And, importantly, speech is protected under the First Amendment. In the Daily Beast piece, I point out that Reagan’s Surgeon General C. Everett Koop kicked off the moral panic about video games in 1982 by arguing that they were harmful and addictive to children. Decades later, that moral panic resulted in California passing a law putting warning labels on video games, which was struck down by the Supreme Court for violating the First Amendment.

It strikes me as quite something that Murthy would choose to use this week to push his unconstitutional attack on free speech, when the Supreme Court is likely to rule, either this week or next, on the case bearing his own name, regarding whether or not he violated the First Amendment in trying to stifle voices on social media.

The US government should win that case for a whole long list of reasons that I’ve explained in the past, because there remains no actual evidence in the record of actual coercion by the government. But, either way, it’s still odd to pick this particular time to then push a clearly unconstitutional attack on the First Amendment in the days leading up to that decision.

In the Daily Beast, I conclude by noting that C. Everett Koop quickly admitted that his remarks regarding video games and kids were off-the-cuff, not based on science, and should not be seen as reflecting administration policy. If Murthy wants to be taken seriously, he should review the actual science and admit to his own error.