Warning labels for social media are exactly the type of feel-good solution that does nothing

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In 1964, U.S. surgeon-general Luther Terry issued a landmark report on the health effects of smoking. After reviewing thousands of studies, the committee tasked with sifting through the evidence concluded that “cigarette smoking contributes substantially to mortality from certain specific diseases and to the overall death rate.” Smoking wasn’t just associated with poorer health outcomes; it was causing them, creating a “health hazard of sufficient importance in the United States to warrant appropriate remedial action.”

That remedial action would come the following year, when the U.S. Congress passed the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act. The Act required that, beginning in 1966, all cigarette packages would bear a label that read “Caution: Cigarette Smoking May Be Hazardous to Your Health.” Over time, the labels would become larger, more descriptive and, in some cases, visually graphic.

Studies have shown that these warnings increase awareness about the harms of cigarette smoking, but not that they necessarily change the behaviour of habitual smokers (though there is slightly more evidence that graphic pictorial warnings may, for example, increase quitting attempts). Indeed, though national rates of smoking in the U.S. had already started to decline by the time warning labels were implemented, they didn’t start to drop precipitously until the 1980s. By then, a combination of factors including anti-smoking campaigns, restrictions on smoking in public spaces and higher taxation resulted in a whole-of-society shift whereby it was no longer cheap, easy or acceptable to smoke around others.

Sixty years later, the current U.S. Surgeon-General is calling for warning labels of another kind. In an op-ed published in The New York Times earlier this week, Vivek Murthy argued that social-media platforms should come with a warning that their use is “associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.” Calling the mental-health crisis among youth an “emergency,” Dr. Murthy acknowledged that warning labels would not be a panacea, but said they would be a necessary tool to “remind parents and adolescents that social media has not been proved safe.”

“In an emergency, you don’t have the luxury to wait for perfect information,” he said.

Dr. Murthy’s suggestion comes at a time when parents’ anxieties about the harms of social media is at an all-time high, fuelled by endless studies, by New York Times bestsellers and by anecdotal reports about kids’ lives being destroyed by social media. We don’t have the sheer volume of research, including vast longitudinal data, on the harms of social networks as we did on cigarette smoking when Dr. Terry issued his report in 1964, nor has there been established a definitive causal relationship (for one, it is hard to isolate teens from social media to conduct a controlled study). But plenty of research does show an association between higher use of social media and, for example, depression in adolescence. We also have common sense: If kids spend hours online comparing themselves to others or looking at photos of events from which they were excluded, they’re probably going to feel bad about themselves. We know this innately.

That’s why warning labels aren’t the answer. While the efficacy of warning labels for cigarettes was mostly in increasing awareness, kids today literally grew up with social media – some of them probably had their pictures posted online within minutes of their birth – and have been lectured about their potential harms for years. Eventually these warnings become background noise (or, if the Surgeon-General gets his way, more pop-ups to be ignored), which doesn’t really change behaviour. And ultimately, the goal – the realistic goal – has to be to modify kids’ behaviour, not to get them off online networks completely. Whereas there is no real benefit to smoking cigarettes, there are demonstrable advantages to online social connections, particularly for kids who feel isolated in their physical communities. Warning labels will paper over the good, creating a taboo out of something that can be used responsibly.

Dr. Murthy suggested that warning labels should be used in concert with other measures to keep kids safe online such as restrictions on collecting data from children, phone-free zones in schools and technical limitations such as ending “infinite scroll.” These are credible suggestions, and ones that, he might argue, would be bolstered by regular on-site reminders on social-media’s harms. But there is an obvious drawback, and that is in offering social-media companies a government-mandated, built-in disclaimer that essentially absolves them of responsibility in potential legal disputes. It also offers a release valve for some of the pressure that social-media companies have faced, from the U.S. Congress and elsewhere, over the way they use their algorithms to make their sites as addictive as possible. If users just need to repeatedly click to acknowledge the harms of logging on, there’s less impetus for companies to actually work to reduce those harms.

Warning labels are the type of hasty, we-need-to-feel-like-we’re-doing-something solution to a complicated problem – one that, at best, will have no effect, and at worst, make things worse. They didn’t work to get smokers to kick their habit, and the draw of a teen to Snapchat is surely an even tougher addiction to break.