US Surgeon General Warns on Possible Social Media Harms for Teens (cnn.com) 66
CNN summarizes the issue. "A recent advisory from U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy says there's not enough evidence to determine whether social media is safe enough for children and adolescents when it comes to their mental health." (Although a CNN news anchor points out that "Nearly all of the research points to negative impacts.")
CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent interviewed U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy "to examine what led him to sound the alarm, and who should be responsible for tackling the issue." And the surgeon general remembers when his five-year-old daughter asked to post a picture on social media. "I think finding the right balance is not easy, in part because, you know, the platforms weren't necessarily designed for balance. They were designed to maximize how much time we spend on them." CNN: How worried are you? When people hear something coming from the surgeon general's office, they think of, you know, smoking, opioids, things like this. Social media — is it at that level of concern for you?
Surgeon General: Yes, I would say yes, it is. And, and — but it's it's more complicated... because we know that some kids do actually get benefit from their experience of social media. Some are able to connect more easily with friends and family, to express themselves more creatively and more openly than they otherwise would, and to find community... But one of the things that has become an increasing source of worry for me is that the the association between social media use and harmful outcomes... [W]e're asking parents to somehow figure it out all on their own. And the reason I issued an advisory on this topic is I worry that we have not taken enough action to support parents and kids...
CNN: What is the level of evidence about the dangers of social media and what is the level of evidence that you want? I mean, what does it take for you as a surgeon general to act on this...?
Surgeon General: I think the first question I'm asking is where is the evidence of safety...? There's a lot of association data, right, that's showing an association between use and certain and negative outcomes, like for example, for kids who who use more than 3 hours of social media a day, they face double the risk of depression and anxiety symptoms. But we also know that kids are telling us in their own words and their own experience how they're experiencing social media. So, for example, about nearly half of adolescents are saying that using social media makes them feel worse about their body image...
And one of the consistent messages I hear from researchers who's been studying this area for a long time is that they are having a hard time getting access to the data from social media companies. You know, as a parent, I don't ever want to feel like someone or anyone is hiding information from me about how a product affects my child. But that's how a lot of parents are feeling right now. And so that's a place where I think transparency matters. Let's get the data out there so independent researchers can assess it and can help us understand the harms and benefits and which kids are most impacted so we can design, you know, our approach, you know, in a more informed way...
One of the things we call for in my advisory is for the policymakers to step in and establish actual, transparent, enforceable safety standards like we do for other products so that parents have some reassurance around safety... This technology is already being used by 95% of kids, Right. And I don't think that's realistic to put the genie back in the bottle here or to say somehow nobody should be using social media, that that's not the goal here... We don't like leave it up to car manufacturers to determine whether or not they've hit the standards or not. We don't do that with medications either. There should be, you know, independent authority that parents can trust are looking primarily in solely out for the welfare of their kids, and they should be the ones who enforce these standards....
You know, just to put it bluntly, I do not think we have done our job as a society to have the backs of kids and parents on this because we haven't moved fast enough to get the information to ultimately guide them on safe use... [P]arents across the country, people are trying to do the best they can with limited information.
The surgeon general also says their ideal legislation would also "help to reduce kids exposure to harmful content" and include "restrictions on features that seek to manipulate kids into spending excessive amounts of time on these platforms."
CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent interviewed U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy "to examine what led him to sound the alarm, and who should be responsible for tackling the issue." And the surgeon general remembers when his five-year-old daughter asked to post a picture on social media. "I think finding the right balance is not easy, in part because, you know, the platforms weren't necessarily designed for balance. They were designed to maximize how much time we spend on them." CNN: How worried are you? When people hear something coming from the surgeon general's office, they think of, you know, smoking, opioids, things like this. Social media — is it at that level of concern for you?
Surgeon General: Yes, I would say yes, it is. And, and — but it's it's more complicated... because we know that some kids do actually get benefit from their experience of social media. Some are able to connect more easily with friends and family, to express themselves more creatively and more openly than they otherwise would, and to find community... But one of the things that has become an increasing source of worry for me is that the the association between social media use and harmful outcomes... [W]e're asking parents to somehow figure it out all on their own. And the reason I issued an advisory on this topic is I worry that we have not taken enough action to support parents and kids...
CNN: What is the level of evidence about the dangers of social media and what is the level of evidence that you want? I mean, what does it take for you as a surgeon general to act on this...?
Surgeon General: I think the first question I'm asking is where is the evidence of safety...? There's a lot of association data, right, that's showing an association between use and certain and negative outcomes, like for example, for kids who who use more than 3 hours of social media a day, they face double the risk of depression and anxiety symptoms. But we also know that kids are telling us in their own words and their own experience how they're experiencing social media. So, for example, about nearly half of adolescents are saying that using social media makes them feel worse about their body image...
And one of the consistent messages I hear from researchers who's been studying this area for a long time is that they are having a hard time getting access to the data from social media companies. You know, as a parent, I don't ever want to feel like someone or anyone is hiding information from me about how a product affects my child. But that's how a lot of parents are feeling right now. And so that's a place where I think transparency matters. Let's get the data out there so independent researchers can assess it and can help us understand the harms and benefits and which kids are most impacted so we can design, you know, our approach, you know, in a more informed way...
One of the things we call for in my advisory is for the policymakers to step in and establish actual, transparent, enforceable safety standards like we do for other products so that parents have some reassurance around safety... This technology is already being used by 95% of kids, Right. And I don't think that's realistic to put the genie back in the bottle here or to say somehow nobody should be using social media, that that's not the goal here... We don't like leave it up to car manufacturers to determine whether or not they've hit the standards or not. We don't do that with medications either. There should be, you know, independent authority that parents can trust are looking primarily in solely out for the welfare of their kids, and they should be the ones who enforce these standards....
You know, just to put it bluntly, I do not think we have done our job as a society to have the backs of kids and parents on this because we haven't moved fast enough to get the information to ultimately guide them on safe use... [P]arents across the country, people are trying to do the best they can with limited information.
The surgeon general also says their ideal legislation would also "help to reduce kids exposure to harmful content" and include "restrictions on features that seek to manipulate kids into spending excessive amounts of time on these platforms."
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Pathetic humans have the right to be eaten by trolls. Especially the babies.
How about the effects of school? (Score:2, Interesting)
This reads the same if you swap "social media" with "school". And before I got modded for trolling, we have some insight now on what happens when kids aren't subjected to in-person school because of pandemic closures. As with the details of science, there's no black-and-white conclusions to assert, but the upshot appears to be that kids do well when they're not stressed about bullying and forced to do meaningless work under threat of being labelled a failure.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w3... [nber.org]
And then he says
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So what you're saying is kids do better in school when they meet face to face with other kids and teachers. Sort of like how people work better when they meet face to face with their colleagues and others.
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I'll have you know I do just as little work at home as I did at the office.
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If you don't mind that they jump off the bridge on the way home...
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If you don't mind that they jump off the bridge on the way home...
In today's world one teenager who jumps off that bridge is sent out worldwide, and everyone looks at it as every teenager who is ever bullied is going to self-delete.
Bullies. Ah yes, we must stop the bullies in their tracks. What do we all figure? Life imprisonment of anyone who posts something mean online?
Perhaps sitting back and taking stock is in order, and thinking maybe the way we as a society are trying to work this bully thing is wrong. When My family moved to a new neighborhood when I was in s
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Lucky you. Unfortunately for me, it was not the shop teacher but instead the principal who witnessed when I actually hit the bully back and kicked a few teeth out his mouth.
Net result was that I got to apologize in front of everyone for defending myself.
Because teachers want peace in the class. And that's easiest accomplished if the bully has an outlet in the form of a victim and the victim shuts up.
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Lucky you. Unfortunately for me, it was not the shop teacher but instead the principal who witnessed when I actually hit the bully back and kicked a few teeth out his mouth.
Net result was that I got to apologize in front of everyone for defending myself.
Because teachers want peace in the class. And that's easiest accomplished if the bully has an outlet in the form of a victim and the victim shuts up.
Those facts certainly molded my perception of the school system. Do not like teachers, loathe school administrators. My SO was always annoyed that I wouldn't go to teacher/parent meetings. Well, I did go to one, where the teacher told me they wanted to put him on Ritalin - like all his male classmates. That didn't work out too well for the teacher. I'm much better at "words" than a mere teacher or school admin. She in turn decided she was okay with me not going to any more.
Sad thing is, many of his Ritali
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In my experience, if kids have attention deficits at school, it's less often the problem of the student and more often a problem with the teacher.
Quite frankly, most people who enter the teaching profession are simply and plainly unsuited for it. The only reason they get away with it is that the people that have first hand experience of their uselessness have no way to get rid of them.
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In my experience, if kids have attention deficits at school, it's less often the problem of the student and more often a problem with the teacher.
Oh my yes. After men were largely chased out of the school systems the now almost all female teachers needed a way to enforce behavior among the male students. So where I lived, there was a very determined effort to chemically straitjacket 100 percent of the enemy - errrrrm - boys.
And yeah, it sort of worked. The lads were nice and quiet. But it damaged the growing brains of the boys https://www.healthline.com/hea... [healthline.com] . And then this creep started stealing her son's Ritalin - https://news.yahoo.com/couldn [yahoo.com]
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The goal of a school is not to solve problems but to make them go away. Since it's no longer really socially acceptable to drug kids with valium and morphine, Ritalin is the next best thing.
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The goal of a school is not to solve problems but to make them go away. Since it's no longer really socially acceptable to drug kids with valium and morphine, Ritalin is the next best thing.
Which brings us to the resulting question - While merrily putting our children in chemical straitjackets without worry, even though we know it damages boy's developing brains, we're taking a societal shitfit about now sOCiaL MeDiA iz BaaAD!
I mean the really really Concerned Surgeon General wants evidence that Social media is safe while ignoring that unneeded drugging of male children has been proven unsafe. Seems like perhaps we are all spun up about a much smaller problem, amirite? I know - I'm preachi
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Social media sure is problematic as it adds another facet to bullying. Until now, at least the bullying stopped when you went home from school and you had some peace and quiet there, but now that keeps going. It's like the bully standing in front of your apartment and continuing his taunting.
A solution to this problem isn't easy to find, though. Like I said, schools will not be very helpful since the only thing they're interested in is to maintain the pretense that everything is quiet and peaceful, no matte
We can make school a better environment (Score:5, Insightful)
There's tons of things we could do to make social media better as well but those would bite into the profits by reducing engagement. School is at its best when it's a public service, social media's relentless drive for engagement means that it's always at its worst the wide variety of extraordinarily unpleasant tricks to maintain addictiveness. Social media and its algorithms don't care about your kids mental health the way of properly run public school system does. All they care about is selling your kids eyeballs and data.
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"ranging from changing how grading works to properly funding our massively underfunded schools "
Lowering standards even more while spending even more money is not a solution unless you're already an administrator.
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He didn't say lowering standards. He said changing how grading works - to me that means no more teaching how to pass the test and more teaching how to use your brain to pass the test.
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It isn't the standard, but the focus on the minutia and competitive with them.
I remember during an interview to get into the masters program, the Dean looking at my transcript, questioned the few 2.3 GPA classes I got. My response sheemed to shock her. "Those were the classes that I learned the most from" The high 3.5 and above were classes that I came into already knowing the bulk of the material, and I just needed to show that I knew it.
The 2.6+ classes. I had a good grasp of the info and learned some
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The purpose of schools is to create wage-slaves and obedience to social and religious norms. Everything else is the fault of either the parent or the child. With the main difference being, teachers can't tell parents to "follow my rules" and can't punish them when they fail.
While social norms are a necessity, labeling below-average performance as failures, pushes the child into a destructive cycle of doing the same thing (because it's not someone else's fault, remember) and expecting different results.
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Grading is tricky. Ideally it would be pass fail based on some reasonable level of demonstration of mastery for skills and knowledge by some date certain. But many parents and students just want task completion. Which is meaningless. Why should someone get a better grade ju
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The thing is, rite of passage to ... what? What do I "pass" to? Becoming like the idiots I sat in school with? Lowering my standards because the teacher actually knows less of the subject than me?
No thank you.
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Schools being funded by property tax levies is a pile of shit that does nothing but enforce a system of haves being better educated than have-nots.
Re:We can make school a better environment (Score:5, Interesting)
So, when we take it away, things get better for everyone. At least in schools. There's a town in Ireland that now has a voluntary minimum age (13) to have a mobile phone. So far, it's been successful & even the kids are saying it's beneficial for them & they understand it. Other Irish towns are observing with great interest: https://www.theguardian.com/te... [theguardian.com]
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Bullying was a thing before social media and cellphones and schools did nothing to address it then.
Now they would like to act like it was created by these things.
It was not. The extent of the problem was created by administrators doing nothing about it. They suck all the money out of the system, leaving nothing for educators, and meanwhile don't actually do their jobs.
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Unfortunately, journalists & pundits, most of whom have never worked in a school, argue that effective behavioural management is oppression. Unless all your students are the daughters of Swiss diplomats, the behavioural management th
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We see this with drug, cars, etc, the primary causes of death for the teen. Most of either abstain or survive. Social media
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The kid tripping on coke was no one's problem but his own. The calculation changes a bit when society has to pick up the pieces, but I do agree, no one is actually doing that calculation. Just clinging to a nostalgic status quo which only existed in their mind. The more things change the more things change.
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We see this with drug, cars, etc, the primary causes of death for the teen.
If "etc" is guns, yes.
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Overall, the trend is a stark decline in automobile caused deaths per capita since the 70s.
Didn't need a government study (Score:2)
Anyone with teens knows how shitty social media is for their healthy development and emotional well being.
I don't think the problem is social media itself (Score:2)
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Yes, that's exactly how they operate. However, I don't see an effective and functional way they can be regulated. Starting with free speech and the broken 230 on the legal side and the impracticality of monitoring and enforcing anything and then who would decide what to enforce? Good luck getting enough people to agree on those standards. No matter what regulations say it'll take about 1 second before they get twisted. Also, since the internet is international, regulations become even more impossible t
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The best answer is parents. Governments can't solve this one.
Pretty much this. The problem is that for whatever reason, today's parenting largely involves passiveness, and trying to regulate the problems.
There are ways to handle problem people on the internet and social media, ranging from ignoring the problem people to avoidance to delivering a social media curb stomping.
The base of the problem is that at present, the concept is trying to legislate bullies and problem people out of existence. As you note - it won't work.
It is better for parents to educate t
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Then don't let you kids use social media.
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Try that with your 14 year old teen girl.
Rather than lay down the law and declare "no" I have been discussing these things with her since she was 11 and not really on the net, yet.
I blocked TikTok on the house router but she can still switch her phone to cell mode or use it away from the house. She doesn't hide that but her usage has gone way down and she occasionally offers up the latest TikTok stupidity challenge in conversation such as the "trash your school bathroom challenge" which happened at her sch
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As a parent you wouldn't want to prevent your kid from drinking. However there are laws that prevent kids from buying alcohol at the stores. Kids will not always obey their parents, more so when they are with other kids. As a parent you also need to balance control and have your children learn freedom. If good enforceable laws are in play on Socal Media companies, that will allow you to give the child freedom while keeping some of the safety.
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Quite true. Social Media isn't good for adults too. A strong logical argument, will often. Have little debate. So it wouldn't track will with the Algorithm. However a stupid comment, that often pushes an emotional appeal, will create debate, and argument. Thus the algorithm will elevate it.
Social Media is information Junk Food, not healthy and full of uninsightful information.
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Without a study the degree of harm wouldn't be quantified.
Otherwise it might just be like Comic Books, TV, Video Games. Which parents claim are hurting their kids where it really isn't.
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They didn't quantify anything and generally speaking it is impossible to quantify social issue effects.
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No, anyone with teens knows the effects on their particular children. And so far the research shows it's quite mixed. Some kids are helped by it, and some are harmed.
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Which kids are helped by watching endless videos on TikTok encouraging them to be anorexic or do stupid and dangerous challenges or generally just filling their mushy little brains with stupid shit?
I'd love to see that explanation.
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The ones who post strawman arguments on slashdot, such as IAmWaySmarterThanYou.
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Ok, so none. Thanks for answering.
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Wow. That was impressively dumb, especially considering your username.
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Yes, you stepped into a conversation, made some stupid remarks, got challenged and fell apart. You didn't even recognize your utter and complete intellectual and rhetorical failure. You think you "won". On the internet. Lol
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It's unreal that you think posting that blindingly obvious strawman was some kind of victory. But go ahead and pat yourself on the back, fella.
Evidence? (Score:1)
We keep finding ourselves here. Decade after decade of people with evidence that turns out to be bullshit. Are you really sure you want your name to go down in the history books next to the likes of Jack Thompson, Tipper Gore, Estes Kefauver, and Will H Hays?
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We keep finding ourselves here. Decade after decade of people with evidence that turns out to be bullshit. Are you really sure you want your name to go down in the history books next to the likes of Jack Thompson, Tipper Gore, Estes Kefauver, and Will H Hays?
Why did you post something insightful as AC though?
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This is not a friendly crowd for people defending the likes of TikTok.
I think that we have a lot of outrage monkeys here, so most opinions will get pushback.
As for TikTok, it is another social media platform, no better or worse than any other.
And I'd hate to see it go away, some of the women posting there about how they can't find a man now that they are 35 and want to settle down and start a family after banging a hundred guys they at the clubs for one night stands over the years are just gold. Makes for some good reaction videos.
just some generalised harm (Score:2)
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Re: just some generalised harm (Score:2)
The surgeon General has determined... (Score:2)
Translation (Score:2)
Social media so obviously bad for teens' mental health that even corrupt US officials can't really deny it anymore.
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No, what he said was that he really doesn't know if it's overall harmful or not, but he would like to see it proven NOT harmful, like they do with drugs.
Why stop there? (Score:1)
There are a lot of psychic epidemics going around which were well under way before social media made an impact.
Shitlord general warns on possible public education and mainstream media harms to kids.
Surgeon general (Score:2)
Do people of this generation even know who or what the surgeon general is? In the 80s the surgeon general was a big deal. C. Everett Koop .. dude was everywhere.
For teens? (Score:2)
How about the millions of meemaws waiting for their teen grand-kids to answer their friend request?
Oswald Spengler (Score:2)
"Media does not spread free opinion; It generates opinion" - Oswald Spengler (b. 1918) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]