WARNING: You Won't Like This New Label

Surgeon General wants warning labels for social media: We already have ‘em for booze and cigarettes. So why not Instagram and TikTok?

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has a New York Times op-ed out today that calls for Congress “to require a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.” Such a label would serve to “regularly remind parents and adolescents that social media has not been proved safe.”

“Faced with high levels of car-accident-related deaths in the mid- to late 20th century, lawmakers successfully demanded seatbelts, airbags, crash testing and a host of other measures that ultimately made cars safer,” Murthy reasons. “This January the [Federal Aviation Administration] grounded about 170 planes when a door plug came off one Boeing 737 Max 9 while the plane was in the air. And the following month, a massive recall of dairy products was conducted because of a listeria contamination that claimed two lives,” he notes. “Why is it that we have failed to respond to the harms of social media when they are no less urgent or widespread than those posed by unsafe cars, planes or food?”

This is a flawed line. Of course, a body panel coming off a plane mid-flight, endangering passengers, is much more urgent than a teenager using social media and sometimes experiencing emotional harms from it. Of course, car crashes, which remain the second largest accident-fatality category in the U.S. and claim some 40,000 lives per year, are a more pressing harm worth solving via seatbelts and airbags than preteens feeling bad about themselves after scrolling for too long.

“For too long, we have placed the entire burden of managing social media on the shoulders of parents and kids, despite the fact that these platforms are designed by some of the most talented engineers and designers in the world to maximize the amount of time that our kids spend on them,” Murthy told CNN last year after he issued a 25-page advisory hitting many of the same notes as today’s Times op-ed. He is correct that social media companies devote teams of engineers to optimizing the algorithm to push people to use the service more, but he’s incorrect to frame it as a David and Goliath situation in which parents cannot be expected to do the hard work of actual parenting.

Of course, some suggestions Murthy has are totally anodyne: schools should get phones out of the classroom, parents should get phones away from the dinner table, and children should probably not be allowed by their parents to get social media accounts until after middle school.

But Murthy can’t resist exaggerating the harms merely a few lines later. “One of the worst things for a parent is to know your children are in danger yet be unable to do anything about it,” writes Murthy. “That is how parents tell me they feel when it comes to social media—helpless and alone in the face of toxic content and hidden harms.”

They’re not helpless or alone. Proper parenting has always been within reach, if they can summon just a smidge of assertiveness—and government has never made a good co-parent.

Murthy seems to think that slapping a warning label on the problem will make it go away. But the parents who are most likely to guide their kids to be good stewards of technology didn’t need these warning labels in the first place, and the kids and parents most likely to have tech-addiction problems aren’t going to be swayed by a health bureaucrat’s warning label.

Scenes from Austin: Nice to be back home in the land of our stoner king.

• On Friday evening, the House passed a bill that would automatically enroll men between the ages of 18 and 26 for the Selective Service, aka the draft.
• Related: “Conscription squads” are hunting Ukrainian draft-dodgers.
• OpenAI just appointed the former National Security Agency head, Paul Nakasone, to its board. “Nakasone is also joining OpenAI’s new safety and security committee—a group that’s supposed to advise the full board on ‘critical safety and security decisions’ for its projects and operations,” reports the Associated Press. But here’s the kicker: “The safety group replaced an earlier safety team that was disbanded after several of its leaders quit.” So the former NSA chief will be handling safety for one of the most important AI companies in the world, what could possibly go wrong?
• “The Greek coastguard has caused the deaths of dozens of migrants in the Mediterranean over a three-year period, witnesses say, including nine who were deliberately thrown into the water,” reports the BBC.
• Better late than never:

This continues a very long pattern of the largest mainstream outlets catching up to thoughtful “heterodox” writers less beholden to kid-gloves takes on certain issues. In this case @NancyRomm beat the Times by a year and a half, but obviously wouldn’t have been able to write this… https://t.co/RpJDiPyeOo

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) June 16, 2024

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