The Surgeon General Calls for a Warning Label on Social Media | Hacker News Reader

The Surgeon General Calls for a Warning Label on Social Media

afterbabel.com

57 pointsthrowup23834 comments

It's funny that the article tries to help establish the need for a warning label by demonstrating the case against social media for adolescents. The idea that a warning label on social media would do anything is sort of funny. My impression is that enough people already know that letting phones raise their children is bad, it's a question of what to do about that. Everybody knows it's bad, nobody seems willing to tell their kids no, you can't have a phone, so putting a warning on it is sort of a meaningless gesture. It's the equivalent of raising awareness about global warming.

In the case of the Surgeon General's warning on tobacco products, I don't think it was the warning that did anything to cut smoking rates. I think it was changing the laws around who you could sell or advertise tobacco products to, and making cigarettes much more expensive. If you want to do something about social media addiction, consider taking measures as severe as these.

The real need here is for the US Govt and state/local govt to get real about consumer privacy and put measures into place where harvesting of data like social media does is not allowed to be used w/o consent of an adult (if at all).

Sadly we are well beyond that.

Historically, warning labels on tobacco products were the first step in lowering smoking rates (at least in the US.) Then came advertising bans, enforced age restrictions, more and more taxes on the consumer, and finally heavy restrictions on smoking areas. Before smoking was banned in most bars and restaurants in the early 2000's, it had already become socially unacceptable to smoke in many places (in the 1970's and earlier you could smoke just about anywhere, just as scrolling on your phone anywhere is now acceptable.)

It was all of these things together that really lowered smoking rates. Algorithmic social media is following a similar path, this is just the very first step.

We also shouldn't expect the social media companies to change by themselves - their incentives, as with tobacco companies, are to make money. And nothing makes money like addictive drugs. Expect more testimony of social media CEO's like the famed 1994 Congressional testimony of the tobacco company CEO's: https://senate.ucsf.edu/tobacco-ceo-statement-to-congress. These guys outright lied to everyone's faces to protect their harmful industry. It was a joke even then.

Medicine, unlikely to be well received here.

Ads are the cigarettes of our time:

1. They are behavior modifying

2. They cause social cancers

3. We are addicted to them - collectively the spend on ads is enormous

Social media is just the most effective ad delivery mechanism, and gets a lot of bad rap, for being the needle rather than people addressing the drug: ads.

I'm not really addicted to ads, though.

I mostly feel like I'm surrounded by dealers willing to stab me with a needle full of the stuff when I least expect it.

I interpret the OP point as addicted to the result of ads (free stuff), not necessarily the ads themselves.

This shows up in a lot of threads about paid search engines and the number of people unwilling to pay $10/month when Google provides similar quality results for “free”.

Infinite scroll and engagement maximizing algorithms are the nicotine.

I'm continuously shocked at how addictive phones can be for some people. There seems to be something about the form factor. Laptops and desktops don't do it the same way. Something about that touch screen in your pocket and your hand that you can just grab and scroll and get dopamine hits is really intense.

I have for a while called social media the "tobacco companies of the mind."

Social belongs in quotes too. As social media has evolved it has become progressively less social, less about communication and connecting people, and more just a crowdsourced chum factory built around addiction. Do Instagram or TikTok even have a concept of a social connection? Do people actually use these to talk to their friends?

Instagram publicly states that most activity happens in DMs. I'm there entirely for my personal network.

You can follow people on TikTok and if people mutually follow each others they are your “friends”.

TikTok has DMs.

Yeah, these things count as social connections IMO. Even though your FYP (the “For You Page”) is determined algorithmically to show you things that you might be interested in from any user across the platform.

(They also have a specific friend feed you can look at instead of the FYP. But if most people are like me then they still mainly scroll the FYP, not the friend feed on TikTok.)

Nitpick, but it's 'bad rap', as in rap sheet.

I'm deeply against advertising and the harms that social media cause, but if you just removed ads entirely it would not fix the problem (even if you could because where do you draw the line on what "influencers" do).

Unless you were home schooled or truly isolated, I'm confident everyone experienced or witnessed at some point the cruelty and mob behavior of children and young adults. Now couple that with the difficulty of scrubbing one's past online.

I fail to see how one arrives to this conclusion. Nobody likes ads, back when I worked in adtech we ad such little engagement from ads we wondered why people even paid for them (it wasn't bad targeting and our business was very profitable)

Literally no one in the world browse instagram or youtube in the hope to see more ads

"Nobody likes ads" -> A lot of people pay a lot of money for them, because they have to or because they see results from revenue.

Also, like in the late stages of addiction, "we wondered why people even paid for them" -> the effect is muted and the drug is still around "for some reason".

While ads targeting teenagers are a problem, it’s not the biggest problem with social media.

The issue is that algorithms give users a distorted view of the world that isolates them from alternative viewpoints. Social networks breed all kinds of extremism from political to body image. Not to mention the potential bullying that can occur.

It’s not just dangerous teenagers. It’s dangerous for adults.

That's not right though. In the analogy, ads are payment for the cig, and anything that results in impressions is the nicotine. The fact that the misaligned incentives result in a bunch of tar, filler, and who knows what else pushed into cig/impression is just industry immaturity.

But here's the thing: like pure nicotine, it turns out that getting rid of all the other crap, while it might be an improvement, still doesn't make nicotine good for you. The addictive substance, in and of itself, even if was given away for free, is terrible for your body and your mind.

I wonder how much of this is people feeling the pain of seeing the truth.

There are thousands of girls more beautiful than you. The math problems you struggle with are trivial for many. Your country is poorer, less safe and worse weathered than another. The moral belief system you grew up with is readily falsified. You've wasted tens of thousands of dollars using k8s when a single VM would host you app.

These things are readily discovered by many people on social media, true but emotionally painful nevertheless.

“Comparison is the death of joy” and social media invites comparison to everyone everywhere, human ambition is great but I increasingly think many of us would be better off if we lived in a more local community oriented world.

The EFF's response to the op ed is worth a read [0]. I happen to firmly disagree with the scientific part of their analysis—the contradictory evidence they cite basically amount to "teens say social media is good for them", which is... questionable evidence at best. But aside from that they do make some important points about the First Amendment problems.

[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/no-online-speech-shoul...

Although it can be a regulation on interstate commerce, the way the US government got around other First Amendment problems with similar warnings was through settlements

That would render this debate moot until other social networks got popular

Looking forward to it

The EFF is wrong here; they are neglecting all the Science we have today on how "Operant Conditioning" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning) based on our current knowledge of Neurobiology can be used to great effect in many dimensions using various techniques.

This phrase from the article; Communications platforms are not comparable to unsafe food, unsafe cars, or cigarettes, is completely wrong. Ideas spread through language/platforms can be dangerous in the physical world eg. Islamic Fundamentalism/Terrorism. While there must be freedom of speech it cannot be anything goes and must be regulated in particular for those sections of society who have not yet attained "Maturity" both biologically and psychologically viz. Children/Teens.

I agree on the science, they're wrong there. But I disagree that speech shouldn't be afforded more protections than unsafe physical goods. Yes, there are real dangers, but I see the danger of regulating speech as even higher.

If a majority vote is all it takes to regulate away a piece of speech, then the majority will be able rapidly consolidate itself and never give way to an alternative perspective. Regulating speech allows for a temporary majority to become a permanent one, which can be very dangerous for any society.

Given that risk we need to be extremely careful about any effort by governments to regulate speech, even for causes that we happen to agree with today.

I am not saying "speech shouldn't be afforded more protections than unsafe physical goods." You have to look at the context and case-by-case basis. Thus the insidious and deleterious effects of Social Media should not be disputed/argued but only the level of regulations should be debated/discussed.

Free Speech is always limited eg. I should be able to say whatever i want about the President but cannot call for his Assassination (except in very rare cases like bloodthirsty dictators/warlords/etc.) Same is the case with majority vote in a democracy, the President is given certain overarching powers like veto/presidential decree etc. which allows him to overrule the majority in exceptional cases.

The point here is the need to act now by imposing some basic level of regulations on Social Media and then work on fine-tuning it over time.

Yeah. I've donated hundreds of dollars to the EFF, but cancelled my recurring donation after reading the EFF's response to that article because I believe the world would be a better place without social media. As you said, the EFF's article lacked scientific rigor - and its dismissal of non-physical harm sat especially poorly with me. I don't regret my previous donations to the EFF and still agree with their overall mission, but I can no longer support them.

That's an odd take. So because you don't like something, you want it to be gone? I'm not sure you actually understood the EFFs goals ? I'm not trying to be rude but it just doesn't make sense to me. Some people don't like encryption, or porn. The eff always campaigned for keeping those things from getting restricted.

I think that something causes widespread harm and so I want that thing more regulated. If the EFF's article only touched on the First Amendment problem, I would wholeheartedly agree with them - it's the other parts which sat poorly with me. I believe that social media's desire and displayed ability to gain, maintain, and control people's attention is dangerous and that the government should highly regulate that danger. I continue to support free speech, including free speech on those platforms.

As someone who was bullied as a child, I think many of the "harms" of social media are the same as bullying, just often turned up a bit because the reach is to much bigger. The problem isn't "social media", it's "people". But as we haven't figured out how to fix people yet, it'll probably be "social media" that gets the attention.

"Bullying" is part of human behavior. Trying to rid the world of this sounds utopian e.g. dangerous.

Alternatively, children having reach and access to bully other children at any time and any place (more specifically, in their own home) is only made possible through technology. Social media absolutely deserves attention.

Also: I was bullied as a child and I suspect this is a claim most adults of any generation can make.

Many social media platforms exacerbate and amplify some of the worst qualities of humans. Bullying is taken to an extreme, people are often engaging with others in bad faith, and other times you're not even engaging with real people at all.

People are much more likely to say mean things to another when they're behind a keyboard and talking to a screen name or avatar. And real life conversations are much harder to manipulate as compared to social media. Add to that that these platforms monetize by keeping your attention, so there is an addictive component to them. Quitting social media is often very hard, psychologically.

You're correct that many of the problems with social media are not unique to the technology, but like a lot of technology it often times makes existing problems worse. There are strong correlations between certain kinds of social media content and the development of eating disorders and self harm, especially among young people. And we have the ability to start mitigating those problems today, but "fixing" human behavior is going to take a little longer.

Great! This is long overdue; Social Media is completely out of control and it definitely is harming the mental health (and by extension physical health) of Children and Teens whose Brains are still developing. Just the other day there was a shocking HN submission on Moms literally pimping out their little girls on Instagram/etc. under the guise of product marketing influencers to the detriment of Society and nothing is being done about it.

Social Media as a communication tool/medium is just amplifying everything (all the good and bad in society) a bazillion fold and worst of all enables a single "bad" person to have a disproportionate effect on the entire Society. It is high-time we establish controls/checks/balances over this entire medium to save Society from itself.

Actual article, an op-ed from the Surgeon General: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/17/opinion/social-media-heal... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40706073)

Love how articles these days always catch the person in the main photo with the mouth open or eyes in an unnatural state.

I think there should be warning/attention labels for everybody, not just adolescents. I am not blatantly against social media use per se. But the way the social media nowadays are structured are to intentionally be as addictive as possible (they call it "engagement"). It will not do much, but maybe it can help in making this more visible, and facilitate more discussion/awareness on that. I am only afraid that companies would implement it similar to cookies banners, trying to make them as annoying to users as possible

It would be interesting if people share browser addons and tricked that help with making such platforms more user friendly and centered. For me, the 2 main ones:

1. unfollowing everybody in facebook apart from 3-4 groups I want to receive updates/events from (with the rest still friends/liked etc but not following them, so I have to actively go to their profiles to get updates if I want).

2. Unhook, an addon for youtube. This shit has saved me.

I see this hysteria about social media and young people to be an object lesson in mistaking correlation with causation.

Teenagers aren't stupid. In surveys [1] they have a bleak future outlook. Now, we can look at that and blame it on doomer social media. But look at the facts: young people are facting bleak economic conditions and a lifetime of debt serviced by an underpaying job. Student debt, housing debt, medical debt, it never ends.

Another data point: despite a bleak outlook for the economy, consumer spending continues to rise [2]. Why? One hypothesis is that a lot of people think they have no future so there's absolutely no point saving (eg anecdote [3]).

So is social media really the problem? Or is it that people feel like they have no future? And if it is the latter, blaming social media for creating that sentiment feels a lot like shooting the messenger.

[1]: https://archive.is/HmZ9d

[2]: https://www.vox.com/money/24159281/consumer-spending-economy...

[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/GenZ/comments/16u9suk/does_anyone_e...

in the survey you linked to, "Social media is the biggest driver of poor mental health, teenagers said in the survey." they're saying it themselves.

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