Surgeon General wants warning labels on social media: We already have wine and cigarettes. So why not use Instagram and TikTok?
Vivek Murthy, Director of Health New York Times The op-ed published today calls on Congress to “require the surgeon general to place warning labels on social media platforms linking social media to serious mental health harms in youth.” Such labels would help “regularly remind parents and youth that social media The media has not been proven safe”.
“Facing high rates of car crash-related fatalities in the mid-to-late 20th century, lawmakers successfully required seat belts, air bags, crash tests and a host of other measures that ultimately made cars safer,” Murthy explained. “This January [Federal Aviation Administration] A door jam of a Boeing 737 Max 9 came off while it was in the air, causing about 170 aircraft to be grounded. The following month, two people died due to listeria contamination, leading to a massive recall of dairy products. important.
This is a flawed line. Of course, having a fuselage panel fall off an airplane during a flight, endangering the safety of passengers, is a much more urgent matter than teenagers using social media and sometimes suffering emotional harm. Of course, car crashes are still the second-leading cause of death in the U.S., claiming about 40,000 lives each year, and compared to teenagers feeling bad about themselves for spending too much time browsing the web, car crashes are a more pressing injury worthy of seat belts and airbags to solve.
“For too long, we’ve placed the entire burden of managing social media on the shoulders of parents and children, even though these platforms are designed by some of the world’s most talented engineers and designers to maximize time,” Mu said last year. After issuing a 25-page recommendation, Gerti told CNN that many of the elements are the same as today’s recommendations. era column. He is right that social media companies have invested teams of engineers in optimizing algorithms to drive people to use the service more, but he is wrong in describing it as a David and Goliath situation in which Under such circumstances, parents cannot be expected to do the hard work of actually raising their children.
Of course, some of Murthy’s suggestions are pure anodyne: Schools should take cell phones out of classrooms, parents should take them off the dining table, and parents should not allow their children to use social media accounts until they graduate from high school.
But just a few lines later, Murthy can’t help exaggerating the harm. “One of the worst things for a parent is knowing your child is in danger and not being able to do anything about it,” Murthy wrote. “This is what parents tell me they feel on social media – feeling helpless and alone in the face of toxic content and hidden hurt.”
they are no Helpless or alone. Proper parenting is always possible if it inspires a modicum of self-confidence─and the government has no way Be a great co-parent.
Murthy seems to think that putting a warning label on the problem will make it go away. But parents who are most likely to guide their children to be good stewards of technology will not need these warning labels in the first place, and children and parents who are most likely to develop technology addiction issues will not be swayed by these warnings.
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- Better late than never:
This continues a long pattern of the largest mainstream media chasing thoughtful “unorthodox” writers who are less circumspect on certain issues. in this case @nancyrom A year and a half ahead of The Times but apparently unable to write this… https://t.co/RpJDiPyeOo
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) June 16, 2024
