US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy is demanding Congress require a safety label on social media apps like cigarettes and alcohol, citing that teens who use them for three hours a day double their risk of depression.
Murthy has a history of advocating for mental health: He issued a similar advisory last year categorizing loneliness as a health crisis comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.
So far, Congress hasn’t done much to curb children’s social media usage, apart from chastising a few tech CEOs and targeting TikTok as a national security threat. Murthy’s emergency declaration on Monday was a call for concrete action.
“A surgeon general’s warning label,” Murthy argued in a recent op-ed in the New York Times, “would regularly remind parents and adolescents that social media has not been proved safe.”
Would it work? Labels on tobacco did lead to a steady decline in adolescent cigarette smoking over the past several decades (that is, until vapes came along … but that’s another story). Murthy acknowledged, however, that a warning label alone wouldn’t fix that the average teen spends nearly five hours a day scrolling, and also suggested that schools, family dinners, and anyone in middle school or below, stay phone-free.
What do you think? Should social media apps be labeled as dangerous for children? Let us know here.Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of Iran's late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, visits Hezbollah's office in Tehran, Iran, October 1, 2024.
When the Islamic Republic’s senior clerics met yesterday to decide on the next supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei reportedly emerged as the favorite to succeed his assassinated father, Ali Khamenei.
6,500: The number of M23 rebels fighting in Congo.
You probably know some of the more familiar German words in English: Schadenfreude, say. Or Angst. Maybe Realpolitik. And if nothing else: Hamburger.