The U.S surgeon general warns that social media can put young people in danger

What Do Teens Say About Social Media? Dr. Murthy: What Can Government and Policymakers Can Do to Improve the Safety and Protection of Children and Teens?

The advisory and many others join a growing number of calls for action around adolescents and social media as experts examine what role it may play in the ongoing teen mental health crisis. Earlier this month, the American Psychological Association issued its first-ever social media guidance, recommending that parents closely monitor teens’ usage and that tech companies reconsider features like endless scrolling and the “like” button.

The surgeon general called for immediate action by policymakers, tech companies, researchers, and parents to protect against the potential risks.

“Adolescents are not just smaller adults,” Dr. Murthy said in an interview with The New York Times about the advisory. They are in a vital phase of brain development, in a different phase of development.

The report said that frequent social media use may affect the development of the brain’s amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, which are important for impulse control, emotional regulation, and social behavior.

Most kids tell me three things about social media. It makes them feel worse about themselves, but they can’t get off it.

Recommendations for policymakers include developing age-appropriate health and safety standards for platforms; funding more research on the subject; and cutting off growth and engagement hacks for kids.

This is useful, I think, because it helps us understand who social networks can be particularly beneficial to. Understanding how and why LGBT kids benefit from these networks disproportionately, for example, could help platforms make themselves safer and more beneficial to everyone else.

He called on tech companies, researchers, families and policymakers to do more to understand the vulnerabilities facing young people and figure out standards to help them stay safe and healthy.

He joined Morning Edition to talk about the new advisory, what children are saying about social media, and what the government can do to increase regulation.

With safety standards in this case, with social media, you want to ensure that … these standards call for measures that protect kids from exposure to harmful content, that protect them from harassment online, particularly from strangers.

It’s a lot to take in. There might be some people who don’t think that the evidence is worth it, especially those who work at social platforms.

We have the data to make good recommendations, and in the meantime we have enough. Good ideas for platforms include conducting independent assessments of the effects on children and adolescents, setting scientific advisory committees to inform product development and sharing data with researchers in a privacy-protective way.

I think this will change. Thanks to the Digital Services Act, academic researchers now have a legal avenue to safely request and study platform data, and I think it will be useful in understanding social networks’ effects on mental health and many other issues.

Of course, there’s still a lot we still don’t know. To return to my old hobby horse, platforms have to give researchers the data they need to understand them better. Part of this is for good reasons related to user privacy; part of it is for the bad reason of not really wanting to understand too deeply the harms their own platforms can cause.

The Importance of Screen Time and Attention Disorder in Children’s Social Media Usage: Evidence from the Sloan Digital Media and Social Media Project

All that said, social network usage has benefits for young people. Most young people, even. There’s a reason 95 percent of them use it!

Four, a simple intervention that seems to produce significantly positive results is simply to reduce the time children spend using it. Spending more than three hours a day on social networks doubles the risk of bad mental health outcomes, including depression and anxiety. Voluntary screen-time controls don’t seem to be doing enough here; lawmakers should consider creating and enforcing daily time limits for apps like these.

It noted that high use of digital media and social media in adolescents without any symptoms of attention deficit disorder was associated with modest yet statistically significant changes in their behavior over the next two years.

The state has increased its regulation this year to get kids off their phones. The failure of Congress to act is one of the reasons.