Social Media Presents Profound Risk For Kids: US Surgeon General

International

oi-Deepika S

US Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy has issued a warning that social media use presents a profound risk of harm to kids’ mental health.

“The most common question parents ask me is, ‘is social media safe for my kids,'” Murthy said. “The answer is that we don’t have enough evidence to say it’s safe, and in fact, there is growing evidence that social media use is associated with harm to young people’s mental health,” he said.

“Up to 95 percent of teenagers are on some form of social media, and a third say they’re on social media “almost constantly,” according to the report.

A survey of 8th and 10th graders revealed that the average time spent on social media is 3.5 hours per day, 1-in-4 spend 5+ hours per day and 1-in-7 spend 7+ hours per day on social media.

When applied across the entirety of the US college population, the introduction of the social media platform may have contributed to more than 300,000 new cases of depression.

“And those who spend more than three hours a day on these platforms face “double the risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes including symptoms of depression and anxiety,” the report said.

“Sleep is essential for the healthy development of adolescents. A systematic review of 42 studies on the effects of excessive social media use found a consistent relationship between social media use and poor sleep quality, reduced sleep duration, sleep difficulties, and depression among youth. Poor sleep has been linked to altered neurological development in adolescent brains, depressive symptoms and suicidal thoughts and behaviors,” the report revealed.

“Nearly every teenager in America uses social media, and yet we do not have enough evidence to conclude that it is sufficiently safe for them. Our children have become unknowing participants in a decades-long experiment. It is critical that independent researchers and technology companies work together to rapidly advance our understanding of the impact of social media on children and adolescents,” Murthy said.

“Our children and adolescents don’t have the luxury of waiting years until we know the full extent of social media’s impact. Their childhoods and development are happening now,” he added.

Murthy urged tech companies to act, noting that after years of middling and insufficient action by both social media platforms and policymakers, parents and young people still bear most of the burden in navigating the fast-changing, often harmful world of secretive algorithms, addictive apps, and extreme and inappropriate content found on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat.