< 'An unfair fight': The U.S. surgeon general declares war on social media

'An unfair fight': The U.S. surgeon general declares war on social media

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MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

Emma Lembke was only 12 years old when many of her friends started using social media. As each one got a phone, things changed.

EMMA LEMBKE: Each one of them, as a result, was getting pulled away from kind of conversation with me, from hanging out with me, from even, like, playing on the playground, like, hanging out outside at school. It felt as though my interactions were dwindling.

KELLY: She figured there must be something special about these apps that would keep her friends from hanging out with her. Lembke begged her parents to get her a smartphone of her own. Eventually, they caved.

LEMBKE: And I got Instagram. And I remember for the first few months I was in love with it. I followed, you know, Kim Kardashian to Olive Garden.

KELLY: But over those few months, Lembke's time on her phone rose from one hour to five, six hours a day.

LEMBKE: As I began to scroll more, I felt my mental and my physical health really suffer.

KELLY: Today, Lembke is the founder of a project called Log Off. It's part of a growing movement by teens and young adults to help adolescents minimize the harms of social media while maximizing its benefits. Yet even she found it hard to stop using social media, and she's not alone. NPR spoke with other teens and young adults who felt they had become addicted to their phones, like Sophie Kepler (ph).

SOPHIE KEPLER: Before I go to bed, when I wake up in the morning, when I'm at school - just you get so, like, involved, keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, like, constantly scrolling.

KELLY: Also Rijul Aora (ph).

RIJUL AORA: Overall, I could see that I had a toxic relationship with social media.

LISA DAMOUR: We do have reason to think that there are aspects of social media, and especially for how some young people use social media, that contributes to overall distress and psychological distress in young people.

KELLY: Lisa Damour is a clinical psychologist who has written about the impact of social media on teens. She worries most about time on social media taking away from things that we know are good for kids, things like getting enough sleep, face-to-face interactions, physical activity.

DAMOUR: We also worry about the toxic content that they are inevitably exposed to on social media. There is no getting around the fact, given especially the algorithmically driven models that we're working with, that if a kid is on social media, they are going to be exposed to hate content, to violent content, degrading content, to content that promotes unhealthy views of the body or the self.

KELLY: CONSIDER THIS - Lisa Damour is one of many psychologists and experts sounding the alarm on the mental and emotional damage social media may be doing to teens and young adults. Coming up, we hear from the U.S. surgeon general on how the federal government should step in to help.

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KELLY: From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly.

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KELLY: It's CONSIDER THIS from NPR. The mental health crisis among young people is an emergency, and social media has emerged as an important contributor. Well, those are the words of U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in a New York Times opinion piece calling on Congress to require a surgeon general's warning on social media. Dr. Murthy goes on to point out that children and adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media have double the risk of mental health problems, problems like depression and anxiety. On average, teens spend nearly five hours a day on social media. Well, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy joined us to speak about this, and I want to note our conversation does contain a reference to suicide.

Now, we know Congress has tried to address this. They have called social media executives in to testify. They have called for changes to algorithms. However, here we are. Why is an official surgeon general warning a solution?

VIVEK MURTHY: Surgeon general's warning is a part of a broader set of solutions. This is a label that we have used in the past for tobacco products and for alcohol products as well. And the data we have from that experience, particularly from tobacco labels, shows us that these can actually be effective in increasing awareness and in changing behavior, but they need to be coupled with real changes to the platforms themselves. Right now, young people are being exposed to serious harms online and to features that would seek to manipulate their developing brains into excessive use, which may be part of the reason we're seeing adolescents spending on average nearly five hours a day on social media.

KELLY: This is features that make it almost impossible to look away, like the infinite scroll features and autoplay, where it just keeps pumping at you.

MURTHY: That's right. And if you think about that, adults are familiar with these too. But there's something unique about the adolescent brain. It's a very sensitive stage of brain development, adolescence. And so when you put that vulnerable brain in the setting of all of these features that would seek to bring them back and keep them on the platform, it is very hard for a young person to pull themselves away. Imagine pitting a young person, an adolescent, a teenager against the best product engineers in the world who are using the most cutting-edge brain science to figure out how to maximize the time you spend on a platform. That is the definition of an unfair fight, and it's what our kids are up against today.

KELLY: One other piece of the complexity of this must be that there are upsides to social media - right? I mean, you and I know them as an adult - in a way that things that past warnings have been attached to don't have. Like, there's no upside to not wearing a seat belt. There's no upside from a health point of view to smoking. There are upsides to the use of social media in the way that they connect people. How do you think about that when it comes to the youngest Americans who you're trying to protect?

MURTHY: So last year when I issued my advisory on social media and youth mental health, I laid out that there were a mix of benefits and harms with social media. It's true that some kids find that with social media, they can reconnect with old friends. They can find a community of people with shared experience.

But I think about the moms and dads and the young people that I've met across the road who have talked about these harms. I think about Lori, who I wrote about in today's op-ed, who spoke about her daughter who was mercilessly bullied on social media and ultimately who took her own life. And her mother was one of those moms who did everything you could think of. She looked at her daughter's phone every day. She told her what platforms she could not be on. And yet she found out afterward that her daughter had multiple accounts that she didn't even know about because she knew how to hide them.

I think about the young people themselves who are telling me that they feel worse about themselves when they use social media. They often feel worse about their friendships. But they also can't get off of the platforms because they're designed to keep them on.

I think about all of that, and these are cries for help. And we've got to respond, you know, as a country. We have allowed this to go on for nearly 20 years, the unfettered spread of social media with very little check, with very little accountability. And we're paying for the price of that right now, but it doesn't have to remain this way. The warning label I'm calling for today would help make sure that parents know what we know as public health and medical professionals, which is that there really is an association here between social media use and mental health harms for adolescents.

KELLY: If I may make this personal, your own children are 6 and 7 years old. Is that right?

MURTHY: Yes. They're 6 and 7.

KELLY: When are you going to let them use social media?

MURTHY: So my wife and I have talked about this, and we have said that we're not going to let them use social media until at least after middle school. And we will reassess in middle school based on a few things - one, their maturity; two, what the data says at that time around safety; and third, whether or not there are safety standards that have been put in place and actually enforced.

But my wife and I also know that this is not going to be easy for us to do on our own. So literally right now, we are in the process of engaging with other parents in our school and trying to arrange some gatherings and meetings where we can collectively talk about this common struggle that we have. And we realize that if we can build a pact with one another as parents to take some of these measures, to delay use, to create tech-free zones, that we have a much better chance of implementing these together than we do struggling alone.

KELLY: Vivek Murthy is the U.S. surgeon general. We've been talking to him about his call to add surgeon general warning labels to social media. Thanks so much.

MURTHY: Thanks so much. It's good to be with you today.

KELLY: And if you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline - just those three digits, 988. This episode was produced by Marc Rivers, Kathryn Fink and Karen Zamora, with additional reporting from Michaeleen Doucleff. It was edited by Courtney Dorning and Justine Kenin. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.

And one more thing before we go - you can now enjoy the CONSIDER THIS newsletter. We still help you break down a major story of the day. You will also get to know our producers and our hosts and some moments of joy from the All Things Considered team. You can sign up at npr.org/considerthisnewsletter.

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KELLY: It's CONSIDER THIS from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.

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