Should Social Media Carry a Health Warning?

A decade or so ago, when I decided to cut and paste health warnings onto the Facebook logo whenever I discussed the company in my classes and presentations, it was in response to the danger I believed the company, and in particular, its founder, posed due to a complete absence of morals or ethics. Little did I know at the time the prescience of this, and that others in positions of authority might eventually share my concerns.

And so it was that on Monday, the US Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, published an op-ed in The New York Times calling for health warnings on social media similar to those carried by tobacco, alcohol, and other harmful consumer products.

Last year, the Surgeon General’s office released a report about social media and young people’s mental health, detailing their usage patterns — more than five hours a day — and the risks involved, including exposure to harmful content, anxiety, depression or suicide stemming from patterns of behavior such as bullying and body shaming. In a 2019 study, it was found that the proportion of young adults with suicidal thoughts or other suicide-related outcomes increased by 47% between 2008 and 2017, precisely when social media use among that age group skyrocketed.

It’s important to understand what this means. The express recognition of the danger of social networks for mental health and codifying this through warning labels may seem over the top, but it is far from so. Every time a regulator imposes this type of labelling, we hear critics saying that they are futile, but the reality is that this labelling plays a fundamental role in raising awareness in society, which is important in countering the negative effects of certain products.

Western societies have a long tradition of prohibition, although experience shows that this tends to drive users underground, where they fall prey to black markets that are difficult or impossible to control. A better approach is through education, so that people can make informed decisions.

At the same time, there is another fundamental issue: the responsibility of those who put these products on the market, and in this particular case, of the person who turned social networks originally designed to keep us in contact with friends and family into the cesspits they are today; the person who reimagined social networks as a way to turn us into raw material, extracting all our information and selling it to the highest bidder.

Key to this goal is maximizing consumption time, which is why social networks need to turn us into content junkies. The person fundamentally responsible for all the problems posed by social networks today is Mark Zuckerberg, who runs several of them with ever-greater power. It is important to reflect on the real contribution of such a person to society, and to consider how we should deal with him, given the harm he has caused. Because the real problem is not social networks, but the psychopaths like him who run them.

Should social networks carry a health warning? Absolutely. Their impact around the world has been pernicious. But we shouldn’t stop there; what we must do is force them to abandon their harmful practices, the first step toward which would be make their business model, based on hyper-segmented advertising, illegal. In short, we must prevent them from ever being able to spy on their users, by whatever means or legal loopholes they may try, and then selling their data to the highest bidder.

It’s a classic case of cause and effect: eliminate the former, and the latter disappears.

(En español, aquí)

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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