Abby McCloskey, Dallas News, June 23, 2024

“This week, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy wrote in The New York Times: “It is time to require a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.” This is a fabulous idea. A bit little and late, but let’s get this train going.

We have more than a decade’s reason to act: A generation of kids who have used social media as a playground with no one telling them it was covered in poison ivy and used needles and venomous spiders and predatory adults lurking under the slides. Even if parents did warn them, well, everyone else was doing it and the itches and bites didn’t show up until a few years later and so things seemed fine until they weren’t.

The warning should be implemented immediately. Doing so is essentially free and top-down, which makes it easier than other surgeon general warnings on things like risky sex or obesity.

It might make people think twice before giving Bobby an iPhone for calling mom after Little League practice gets out. It should certainly put some pressure on schools to amp up their experiments with phone lock pouches instead of students lighting up with a Surgeon General warning item on campus. (I recently was allowed to preview a survey from a nearby school showing that teachers want phones taken from campus, parents too, but students want to keep them. I’m sure they wanted to keep the cigs too, back in the day.)

Politicians around the world have their finger to the wind. It’s blowing against Big Tech. AI seems too big to tame, so we have to take action where we can, like limiting kids’ exposure to addictive content and devices that destroy their mental health.”