Tweets to kill: Are cigarette-type warning labels coming to social media?

Last month, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy wrote a New York Times op-ed calling for warning labels on social media platforms akin to those on tobacco products. These labels would apply to social media platforms rather than censorship tools to warn users away from individual posts or accounts.

Murthy’s announcement was met with support from both sides of the aisle. Former President Barack Obama applauded the Surgeon General's support for “sensible rules to mitigate the damaging effects of social media on kids’ mental health,” and Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) posted a tweet giving thanks for his comments on social media’s dangers.

Free speech is necessary for humans to use reason in their pursuit of truth and the common good, strengthening the social order and human flourishing.

Lawmakers have been discussing the issue for some time. Prior to Murthy’s recent statements, both Republican and Democrat lawmakers had already floated legislation restricting social media use for minors. For example, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) are leading a bipartisan group of senators to introduce a bill to keep kids off social media.

In March 2024, Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill banning kids under 14 from creating social media accounts while allowing 14- and 15-year-olds to create accounts with parental consent.

While an increasingly attractive political target, social media is tricky to regulate broadly or well. Most parents are at least moderately concerned with their children being exposed to explicit content, wasting too much time, experiencing depression and anxiety, or being bullied on social media. And these concerns aren’t unfounded. Studies show that high social media use harms mental health and negatively impacts one’s body image.

But it’s not certain whether warning labels actually impact behavior. At the end of the day, a lot of parents probably do not care or are simply ignorant about the potential side effects of social media. Despite the obvious dangers of social media, many worry their children will be seen as “weird,” feel left out, or simply get left behind socially without social media. Parents who themselves feel behind the tech curve may naively believe that their children are wiser than their parents on the issue or suppose that their exceptional children won’t be too badly affected by social media’s attention-span-destroying algorithms.

Striking at the root

Regardless of the efficacy of warning labels, the Surgeon General’s comments possess the right spirit, and may be a signal of public policy moving in the right direction. Real progress on the issue means taking the limits of warning labels in stride and pushing still more aggressively toward the roots of social media’s worst problems, where, whatever the difficulties with regulation, Big Tech can hardly be trusted to regulate itself. Congress should, for instance, restrict access to pornography, one of the most harmful facets of social media. In fact, the Surgeon General’s op-ed calls for Congress to pass legislation to “shield young people from ... sexual content that appears too often in algorithm-driven feeds.”

The pornography industry is booming, and what’s most concerning is that its success is partly due to the increasing consumption of it by boys younger than 18. A report by Common Sense Media showed that the majority of teens between the ages of 13 and 17 said they have watched pornography. Some have come across it by age 10.

Perhaps of still greater significance than such early exposure are the damaging problems caused by chronic pornography consumption. Studies have shown that porn consumption is linked to increased problem sexualized behaviors and higher rates of sexually aggressive and dangerous behaviors.

Porn harms families and relationships, and a porn addiction is almost as bad as a drug addition.

Many on the right find porn detestable on a personal level but have philosophical qualms with anti-porn legislation and appeal to the First Amendment’s protections of freedom of expression — even though restricting porn doesn’t run afoul of the First Amendment insofar as obscene speech and expression is unprotected. A federal pornography ban is something Congress can and should work toward.

Free speech is necessary for humans to use reason in their pursuit of truth and the common good, strengthening the social order and human flourishing. Content that degrades the soul and disrupts society, through both the consumer and the producer sides, cuts against the spirit of the First Amendment.

But, practically, a ban may be difficult to enforce. It’s easy to see courts disagreeing, perhaps vehemently, over what “counts” as pornographic, obscene, or harmful and at what age. An alternative and compromise to a federal ban would probably gain more traction faster: a mandate, for instance, to paywall all sexually explicit content putting the burden on porn companies to verify the age of their users. Such legislation addresses many prominent free-speech concerns while protecting those who are harmed by porn the most.

Band-Aids in the form of social media warning labels are better than nothing. But Americans need more protection than that — and can get it without harming their Constitutional rights.