I’ve been thinking about addiction lately, as it relates to the use of social media by everyone in society and, more specifically, adolescents. My cogitating on this topic was seeded from an article by Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General of the USA. Now Surgeons General tend to be fairly circumspect and prefer to let long-term scientific inquiry dictate bth their advice and public sentiment. But on this one Murthy has come out swinging, and for good reason.
He started off by likening the mental health crisis among young people to an emergency that he would have had to deal with in an ER setting. As he explained, adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of anxiety and depression symptoms, and the average daily use in this age group, as of the summer of 2023, was 4.8 hours. Additionally, nearly half of adolescents say social media makes them feel worse about their bodies.
He went on to make calls for a Surgeon general’s warning on social media platforms that clearly sets out that social media use is associated with mental health harm for young people.
I guess there are two questions when it comes to Murthy’s calls. Firstly, how effective is a Surgeon General’s warning at changing consumer behaviour? To cast an analogous decision, how likely are people to NOT smoke simply because the health warning messages on cigarette packets become more gruesome by the day?
The second question is whether consumer warnings are the right way to control behaviours or, indeed, if trying to control behaviour is the right thing to do at all. My more Libertarian-leaning readers would strongly suggest that it’s a case of caveat emptor – that individuals should be able to make their own choices unencumbered by the moral positioning, justified or otherwise, of authority.
