The U.S. surgeon general, Vice Admiral Vivek H. Murthy, issued a new advisory warning about social media and the impact it has on youth mental health.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services website, this advisory warning is meant to issue a call for urgent action by policymakers, technology companies, researchers, families and young people alike to gain a better understanding of the full impact of social media use, maximize the benefits and minimize the harms of social media platforms, and create safer, healthier online environments to protect children.
Elon assistant professor of psychology Dr. Ilyssa Salomon, whose professional expertise includes social media and adolescence, offered her own insight about the surgeon general’s advisory warning.
Now that there have been three generations that have been immersed in social media; millennials, Generation Z and Generation Alpha, what do we now know about social media that warrants a warning from the surgeon general?
I think what we're seeing is it's been around long enough, one research study is one research study, and I think we learn a lot and can zoom out when we accumulate evidence over time and combine that evidence in meaningful ways. I think the reason that we're seeing a firmer stance on a lot of this is because we've had that time to put together big review papers or meta analyzes that can look at the results from smaller studies and combine them to get the sense of the overall effect. I also think social media seems to only have grown in popularity and the way that it has become embedded in sort of our social fabric, or how we pass the time, how we spend our time in entertainment. I think it's a combination of not only time passing, but it getting even more evolved, and us using it more and more in different ways
Social media is now the third product to have a surgeon general warning, along with tobacco and alcohol products, because of its addictive qualities and harm to a person’s health. What do we know about social media’s addictive properties?
There are people who study this addiction-like behaviors or feelings about social media, and that would be anything that you're doing regarding media or social media that's interfering with your functioning or your quality of life. I think that's kind of how it's similar from a physiological perspective. I think there are a lot of differences, so it's not necessarily to minimize the suffering that comes along with substance use disorder, but I think there are some parallels — we're seeing that people are using something to an extent in ways that are not having good effects on them or that are interfering with their functioning. It's called many things, like problematic smartphone use, internet addiction, maladaptive media use, all these different names to kind of refer to the same thing we're seeing. It's not kind of good for you or having a good impact on your life.
I think one of the hardest things about making generalized statements about media or social media is that it is very customizable. What someone is doing depends on there depends. What platform are they using? What type of specific content are they looking at or engaging with? What kind of behaviors are they creating? Are they just consuming? There's lots of things here that I think impact what's happening. When you hear about, obviously, there's evidence that it can have a negative impact, and there's some studies that study positive outcomes. I think it's, it just depends, and I think it's really challenging to specifically pinpoint what exactly is happening that's having a negative impact.
With your own research specializing in the impact that social media has on adolescents, what are your thoughts on the surgeon general’s call to put a warning label on social media?
I can only see it from my perspective, which is, I'm not a public health researcher. From my perspective in reading the original article that he put out, he mentioned, we're not waiting for perfect information before we act and clearly there seems to be a relationship here that people should be aware of. It seems like they're just doing it to bring attention to it and I think a lot of people are aware of it. In terms of the warning label, to me, it never hurts to bring awareness. I focus more on the effect on individual psychology, or maybe groups, just people you know, how they think and feel. From my point of view, tell people that you know they should be aware of it, and then what, what comes from that? Maybe more conversations, more intentional use, or just, you know, parents, guardians, helping kids to form better values around technology prepare them for the world that they're clearly going to enter when they are adults.
Do you think this call for a warning label has been a long time coming?
Salomon: I think social media coupled with smartphone technology continuing to evolve, the portability of it, being able to carry it with you, plus social media sort of becoming more what we know it as today, becoming more popular, I feel like those two things combined really did change the game in terms of, what does media interaction look like today, or generationally. What did it look like for millennials? What did it look like for Gen Z and now Gen Alpha? We talk a lot about kids on social media, but there's another side of it, of parents on social media, so parents using their phones and parenting differently based on that. I think certainly millennial to Gen Z to Gen Alpha does capture some big change. Now it's getting more and more saturated, and that goes for smartphones and for social media. It's been an interesting few decades with seeing this evolve into what it looks like now and where it’s going.
How can college students combat the negative effects that social media can have on their health?
Salomon: I feel like when I read the papers exploring all the different aspects of what type of social media have what impact on mental health, it kind of comes down to things that I see as already occurring, or kind of values that you would already think are important to hold true that get exacerbated. Social media is kind of like the perfect scenario to kind of take advantage of that process, like for body image. A lot of my research is focused on body image, partly why people feel negatively about their own bodies is because of the standards that we set, sort of culturally and societally I'm going to compare myself to that. That's not new, that studying that has been around for a long time, looking at magazines and television, but with social media, it's kind of this perfect little environment to socially compare yourself to people. We have an endless feed of, you know, people to maybe look at. We also see that people are getting reinforced for their physical appearance, they're getting likes, they're getting comments, they're getting brand deals and money and fame and all these things.
I think when it comes to thinking about how social media affects you as a person, you should look at your hot buttons, right? What is it that you struggle with? Think about the ways that your social media use might be contributing to narratives that don't really serve you. If it's loneliness, then maybe it's am I spending too much time in a virtual world and sacrificing in person interactions and friendships and getting together with people for that? Think about the things that promote positive well being, and think about the ways that social media might either hinder that or actively contribute to the opposite. If you can pick up on that, I think then you start to understand the ways that social media isn't serving you, but I do think it's quite individual. There's general advice that probably anyone would agree with, like, don't be on your phone and not sleep. In a lot of ways, technology has been a blessing in some respects, and a curse in other ways, so it's hard. I feel like it does depend on the individual. It depends on their situation.
Do you think that this warning will decrease the amount of damage that social media can do?
I guess if it was the shift for someone, maybe if you dismissed the relationship between social media use and psychological outcomes in the past, and this was what made you think, ‘OK, maybe this is something that I should pay attention to,’ then maybe it is that. If you're an adult at an individual level, you look at that and start to maybe think about how media makes you feel, how do you feel after you use social media, how are you using it in ways that may not serve you. For parents, again, thinking about more from an adolescent perspective, if that's what gets them to realize, ‘OK, this does seem to be something I should be talking to them about or starting those conversations,’ then I don't really see how that could be bad. It's not like it's never a guarantee that it's going to do anything, but hey, I think awareness is awareness, so ideally, that would help people make better decisions that are healthy for them.