Lawmakers must “step up and act now” to protect the nation’s young people from the harms of social media, former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said Sunday.
“I think Congress has so far failed in its responsibility to protect our kids, but it’s not too late,” Murthy, who served under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, said in an interview on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.”
“It’s the equivalent of putting our kids in cars with no seat belts, with no airbags, and having them drive on roads with no speed limits and no traffic lights,” he added. “That is just morally unacceptable.”
Murthy said he has called on Congress to not only put warning labels on social media platforms so parents and children can be aware of risks, but to establish safety standards for the platforms.
“Data transparency is required,” said Murthy. “Researchers routinely say they can’t get the full data about the impact of these platforms on our kids’ health from the companies. But just like we did for cars a few decades ago, where we put in safety standards that got us seat belts, airbags, crash testing, and those reduced the number of deaths, we need to do the same for social media.”
He added that the age of 16 is a “good benchmark” when it comes to being on social media.
“We know that our brain is evolving a lot during adolescence, and what we’ve also seen in studies is that kids who are using social media a lot, who have problematic social-media use, we do see changes both in the structure and the function of the brain,” Murthy said.
The Senate in recent years has passed the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0), but civil liberties groups and social media companies pushed back, and neither bill got a House Vote.
Murthy on Sunday linked the rise in social media use among children to a broader loneliness epidemic.
Chronic loneliness, he said, can cause serious health dangers, such as increasing the risk for heart disease, inflammation in the body, and other conditions that can shorten a life.
Online friends are not the same or as beneficial as in-person connections, Murthy added.
“What I worry about, for young people in particular, is the impact that technology is having on their social connection,” he said. “We tend to think, ‘Oh, kids are on social media. That’s great because they’re connected to one another.’ But no, we have to recognize there’s a difference between the connections you have online and the connections you have in person.”
Children also struggle with online comparisons, which is “shredding their self-esteem,” Murthy warned.
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