Time to Stop the Social Media Experiment on American Kids
The U.S. Surgeon General’s Remarkable Advisory on Social Media Harms and the Urgent Need for Action
United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a remarkable public advisory last Tuesday urging immediate action to help protect American children from the dangerous mental health harms posed by widespread social media use. “In light of the ongoing youth mental health crisis, it is no longer possible to ignore social media’s potential contribution to the pain that millions of children and families are experiencing,” Dr. Murthy wrote in a Washington Post op-ed last week to accompany the advisory.
Unbeknownst to them, our children have served as guinea pigs in the social media experiment spanning several decades.
The surgeon general’s 19-page report provides an important examination of social media’s ongoing threat to the health and well-being of American children and adolescents and offers several helpful recommendations. At the same time, Dr. Murthy makes a number of unrealistic recommendations and asks too little of parents when it comes to protecting children.
The surgeon general’s advisory summarizes what we know about how social media impacts American children. Although social media may offer some benefits to kids, “there are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents” wrote Dr. Murthy. “At this time, we do not yet have enough evidence to determine if social media is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents. We must acknowledge the growing body of research about potential harms.”
The report explores the damage caused by exposure to widely accessible “extreme, inappropriate, and harmful content.” Children encounter platforms showing everything from “live depictions of self-harm acts like partial asphyxiation, leading to seizures, and cutting, leading to significant bleeding.” Dr. Murthy also highlights how children see images of perfect people, facilitating unhealthy social comparison, especially among teen girls, often resulting in eating disorders and depression. Additionally, the report notes that children and adolescents experience cyberbullying and encounter hate-based content and predators at alarming rates.
To top it off, the social media enterprise appears to turn many children into addicts. According to the advisory, “up to 95% of youth ages 13-17 report using a social media platform, with more than a third saying they use social media ‘almost constantly.’” The report cites the existence of studies indicating that “people with frequent and problematic social media use can experience changes in brain structure similar to changes seen in individuals with substance use or gambling addictions.” One-third or more of girls participating in a nationally representative survey “‘say they feel ‘addicted’ to a social media platform.”
The advisory discusses how many young people – often awake and on screens after midnight – experience problematic sleep. Sleep disruption is associated with depressive symptoms and negative effects on brain development. Dr. Murthy also highlights links between social media use and adolescent attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
To address this serious situation, the surgeon general outlined specific suggestions. He recommends policymakers do more to protect the privacy of children. He urges technology companies to enforce age minimums and design systems and features with the well-being of children in mind. He advises parents to set limits. And he encourages children to track the amount of time they spend online.
While Dr. Murthy deserves credit for highlighting the problem and offering some reforms, some of his suggestions seem impracticable. His suggestion that tech companies “design, develop, and evaluate platforms, products, and tools that foster safe and healthy online environments for youth” and his call to “avoid design features that attempt to maximize time, attention, and engagement” seem rather unrealistic considering the fact that financial incentives motivate companies such as Meta and Twitter to do the exact opposite.
The surgeon general encourages children to call the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline if necessary and track the amount of time they spend online. Will an 8-year-old do this? Will a 15-year-old seriously chart out his online habits? Dr. Murthy urges kids to “learn and utilize digital media literacy skills to help tell the difference between fact and opinion.” That’s unlikely to happen unless parents and teachers take the lead.
The surgeon general’s recommendations also fall short when it comes to assumptions about the role of parents. He lets parents off too easily and underestimates their (often under-utilized) power to combat this pernicious problem. The immediate and urgent solution Dr. Murthy seeks can be accomplished in significant part by parents willing to take the counter-cultural action of moving toward eliminating social media use for younger children and at least seriously curtailing and managing it for older children.
What does that look like?
Parents can simply choose not to introduce smartphones or social media to children ages 15 and under in the first place. If children already have phones, parents can consider making an immediate u-turn. Take the devices and determine how best to ensure your child’s social needs are being met in a healthy way. That may not be pleasant or easy. But it may be necessary.
If an elementary age child must have a phone for purposes of communication, then provide a flip phone for emergencies.
Limit the number of screens at home. Require kids to use a centrally located desk top with a large and visible monitor situated where parents can easily view the screen. Don’t allow young children to use the desktop and the internet unsupervised. And don’t allow children to use phones or computers in their rooms.
Dr. Murthy recommended working with other parents to support healthy social media use. Rather than just connecting with one another to manage and maintain social media use, parents can connect with one another to support replacing social media among a circle of friends with alternative methods of interaction - in-person visits for example.
As the surgeon general’s report demonstrates, the social media industrial complex has been running an experiment and the results are in: social media is a disaster for our children.
It’s time for parents to intervene, end the experiment, and protect children.
After all, our kids aren’t guinea pigs.
Until the next post,
Antonette