The United States wants to put warning labels on TikTok and Facebook: ‘Social networks are harmful to your health’

The Surgeon General of the United States calls for social networks to be equated with tobacco or alcohol, but they continue to let children use them.

The debate about the negative effects of social media is eternal, but nothing has changed about it… until now. US Surgeon General Dr Vivek Murthy has called for social media to display warning labelsto report the danger they represent to mental health.

In a interview in The New York Timesthe US Surgeon General cites several studies that have shown that social media is harmful to mental health, especially for teenagers and people with insecurities.

In 2019, the American Medical Society found that adolescents who spend three hours a day on social networks, double the risk of suffering from anxiety and depression. In 2023, the average use in this age range is 4.8 hours, according to TechSpot.

Social media warning labels

But it is not necessary to go to external studies to obtain worrying data. The internal study of Facebook is very famous, which was leaked to the press in 2021. During years, Facebook was studying the effects of its social networks on the mental health of adolescents.

This study collected data from Instagram: “We make body image problems worse for one in three teenage girls,” or “32% of teenage girls said that when they felt bad about their body, Instagram made them feel worse.”

Despite the report, Facebook announced the creation of its Instagram for kids, to get them hooked from an earlier age. Fortunately, they were stopped.

¿How likely are we to see warning labels on social media?similar to those carried by the tobacco and the alcohol? Well, seeing the protectionist wave that sweeps the United States, from abortion to porn, there are quite a few possibilities.

After the idea was proposed by the United States Surgeon General, It is Congress that must prepare the law, and vote on it. If these procedures are followed, banners of the type “Social networks are harmful to health”, appear on all websites, apps and other places from which social networks are accessed.

As Dr. Vivek Murthy himself says, they have been effective with tobacco, so he hopes they will also be effective with TikTok, FacebookInstagram and company.

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Tags: Facebook, Instagram