When U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy announced Monday that he plans to put mental health warning labels on social media platforms, he was met with cheers from many parents and educators who spoke of a long, lonely struggle to wean children off a habit that was harming them.
However, he received a somewhat cool response from some scientists who study the links between social media and mental health. In interviews, several researchers said that the broad warning offered by Dr. Murthy – “social media is associated with significant harms to mental health for adolescents” – exaggerates and oversimplifies the scientific evidence.
For several years, researchers have been trying to figure out whether time spent on social media contributes to poor mental health, and “the results have been really mixed, with probably the consensus being that no, there's no relationship,” said Dr. Mitch Prinstein, chief science officer for the American Psychological Association.
What seems to be more important is what they are doing while online – for example, content related to self-harm has been shown to increase self-harm behaviour, he said.
“It's a bit like saying, 'Is the number of calories you eat good or bad for you?'” Dr. Prinstein said. Testimony was given before the Senate on this subject last year. “It depends. Is it candy, or vegetables? If your kid spends all day on social media looking at the New York Times feed and talking about it with their friends, then it's probably OK, you know?”
Like the other scientists interviewed, Dr. Prinstein praised Dr. Murthy for drawing attention to the mental health crisis. He said he is very optimistic about policy changes to prevent social media use from interfering with school, sleep and physical activity. Following Dr. Murthy's announcement, California Governor Gavin Newsom said he praised Dr. Murthy for drawing attention to the mental health crisis. Calls for a statewide ban Ban on smartphone use in California schools.
“What’s happening there, and I think the surgeon general has understood this very well, is that parents are feeling very helpless,” Dr. Prinstein said. “He’s giving everybody in this conversation some ammunition to say, ‘Look — I don’t care how angry my child might be at me, if the surgeon general says this might be harmful, I think it’s appropriate to remove the device at 9 p.m.’”
In his essay Arguing for the warning label, published in The New York Times on Monday, Dr. Murthy relied more on anecdotes than scientific research. He gave an example 2019 The study found that teens who spent more than three hours a day on social media doubled their risk of developing symptoms of anxiety and depression.
Dr. Murthy has ready answers for his academic critics. He says that children growing up now “do not have the luxury of waiting for years to learn the full extent of social media's impact.” When challenged for evidence of social media's harmful effects, he argues that “we simply do not have sufficient evidence to conclude that social media is sufficiently safe.”
“Warning labels are important until we get to the point where social media is truly safe,” he said in an interview.
In interviews, several researchers said the proposed warning was overly broad and could have adverse effects.
“These advisories are generally reserved for products that are not used at safe levels, or that cause harm when used as intended by the manufacturer,” 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 does not support the view that social media in and of itself is dangerous.”
Instead, he said, it is “a context where both good and bad things can happen.”
Even before Dr. Murthy’s announcement, a number of researchers were challenging the widely accepted link between social media and mental health crises. Published in March “Anxious generation,Jonathan Haidt, a professor at New York University's business school, argued in an article that the spread of social media has led to an “epidemic of mental illness”.
The book, which spent 11 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, was criticized in the journal Nature by Candice L. Odgers, a professor of psychological science in informatics at the University of California, Irvine. “Hundreds of researchers, including myself, have searched for the large effects suggested by Haidt,” she wrote. “Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small, and mixed relationships.”
Dr. Odgers, who has been contacted by so many reporters that she distributed a six-page summary of the scientific literature on the subject, listed large-scale meta-analyses and reviews that have found that social media use has small effects on health, among them 2023 report of an expert committee constituted by the National Academies of Sciences,
Following Dr. Murthy's call for a warning label on Monday, Dr. Odgers said the nation's top health official was running the risk of labeling common teenage behavior as “shameful, harmful and dangerous.” That could lead to conflict in families and deprive young people of places where they find support.
Meanwhile, he said, “the real causes of young people’s mental health problems are not being addressed.”
“I understand that the government and the surgeon general want to regulate social media companies,” she said. “And they see a way to do that, but there's a cost to it, and children and families are going to pay the price.”
Mr. Haidt and his occasional collaborator, psychologist Jean Twenge, say there is ample evidence that excessive social media use leads to poor mental health, and they say young people often do it themselves. Social media was cited as the main reason for this of crisis.
Dr. Twenge, author of “Generations: The Real Differences Among Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers and Silents — and What They Mean for America’s Future,” said the discrepancy is probably rooted in the way research psychologists are trained to analyze statistical correlations, often dismissing them as small.
His colleagues in public health might look at the same data and see an unacceptable risk that requires action. For them, not taking action might be the more dangerous option, he said. “What is the risk of teens and children spending less time on social media?” he said. “If we're wrong, the consequences of taking action are negligible. If we're right, the consequences of doing nothing are huge.”