When U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy announced Monday that he planned to push for a mental health warning label on social media platforms, it was met with cheers from many parents and teachers, who described a long, lonely match. wean children away from a habit that has harmed them.
It received a cooler reaction from some scientists who study the relationship between social media and mental health. In interviews, several researchers said that the general warning suggested by Dr. Murthy – “social media is linked to significant mental health harms for teenagers” – is stretching and oversimplifying the scientific evidence.
For many years, researchers have tried to determine whether a child’s time spent on social media contributed to poor mental health, and “the results have been really mixed, with probably the consensus being that no, it’s not,” said Dr. Mitch Prinstein, chief scientist at the American Psychological Association.
What seems to matter more, he said, is what they do when they’re online — content about self-harm, for example, has been shown to increase self-harm behavior.
“It’s like saying, ‘Is the number of calories you’re eating good for you or bad?’ said Dr. Prinstein, who testified before the Senate on the issue last year. “It depends. Is it candy or is it vegetables? If your kid spends all day on social media following the New York Times feed and talking about it with their friends, it’s probably okay, you know?”
Like other scientists interviewed, Dr. Prinstein applauded Dr. Murthy for drawing attention to the mental health crisis. He said he was very optimistic about policy changes that might come next so that social media use doesn’t interfere with school, sleep and physical activity. Following Dr. Murthy’s announcement, Governor Gavin Newsom of California called for a statewide ban on smartphone use in California schools.
“What’s going on out there, and what I think the surgeon general has tapped into so well, is that parents feel so incredibly helpless,” said Dr. Prinstein. “It gives everybody in this conversation some ammunition to say, ‘Look — I don’t care how upset my child is with me, if the surgeon general says this might be harmful, I feel justified in removing the device at 9 p.m.’ “
In his essay outlining the case for a warning label, published Monday in the New York Times, Dr. Murthy relied more on anecdote than scientific research. He cited a 2019 study that found teens who spent more than three hours a day on social media faced double the risk of symptoms of anxiety and depression.
Dr. Murthy has ready answers to his academic critics. He says kids growing up now “can’t afford to wait years until we learn the full extent of the impact of social media.” When challenged about evidence of the harmful effects of social media, he argues that “we don’t have enough evidence to conclude that social media is sufficiently safe.”
“The warning label is important until we get to the point where social media is actually safe,” he said in an interview.
In interviews, several researchers said the proposed warning was too broad and could fail.
“These advisories are typically for products that do not have a safe level of use or that cause harm when used exactly as the manufacturer intended,” said Nicholas B. Allen, director of the Center for Digital Mental Health at the University of Oregon. “This is not an accurate description of social media. The scientific evidence simply does not support the view that social media is inherently dangerous.”
Instead, he said, it is “a context where both good and bad things can happen.”
Even before the announcement of Dr. Murthy, several researchers have questioned the widely accepted link between social media and mental health crisis. That debate intensified after the March publication of “The Anxious Generation,” by Jonathan Haidt, a professor at New York University’s business school, which argued that the spread of social media had led to “an epidemic of mental illness.” .
The book, which has spent 11 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, was published in the journal Nature by Candice L. Odgers, a professor of psychological science in computer science at the University of California, Irvine. “Hundreds of researchers, including my own, have looked for the kind of large effects that Hyde suggests,” he wrote. “Our efforts have produced a mixture of no, small and mixed compounds.”
Dr. Odgers, who has been approached by so many reporters that she is distributing a six-page summary of the scientific literature on the subject, has documented large-scale meta-analyses and reviews that have found that social media use has little health impact, including a report for 2023 by an expert panel convened by the National Academies of Sciences.
On Monday, after Dr Murthy called for a warning label, Dr Odgers said the country’s top health official ran the risk of branding normal teenage behavior as “shameful, harmful and dangerous”. This could lead to conflict within families and cause young people to be excluded from spaces where they find support.
Meanwhile, he said, “the real causes of youth mental health problems remain unclear.”
“I understand that the government and the surgeon general want to regulate social media companies,” he said. “And they see an opening to do that here, but there’s a cost, and kids and families are going to pay that.”
Mr Haidt and his occasional collaborator, psychologist Jean Twenge, argue that there is ample evidence that more social media use leads to poorer mental health, and note that young people themselves often cite social media as a major cause of distress . .
Dr. Twenge, author of “Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents — and What They Mean for America’s Future,” said the disconnect may be due to the way research psychologists are trained to analyze statistical correlations, often dismissing them as small.
Their public health colleagues may look at the same data and see an unacceptable risk that requires action. For them, not acting can be a riskier option, he said. “What’s the risk of teens and children spending less time on social media?” he said. “If we’re wrong, the consequences of taking action are minimal. If we are right, the consequences of doing nothing are enormous.”
