“The warning label is important until we can get to the point where social media is actually safe,” he said in an interview.
In interviews, several researchers said the proposed warning was overly broad and could backfire.
“These advisories are usually reserved for products that have no safe level of use, or that cause harm when used exactly as the manufacturer intends,” said Nicholas B. Allen, the director of the Center for Digital Mental Health at the University of Oregon. “This is not an accurate description of social media. The scientific evidence simply does not support a view that social media is dangerous per se.”
Instead, he said, it is “a context where both good and bad things can happen.”
Even before Dr. Murthy’s announcement, a number of researchers were challenging the widely accepted link between social media and the mental health crisis. That debate intensified after the March publication of “The Anxious Generation,” by Jonathan Haidt, a professor at New York University’s business school, which argued that the spread of social media had led to “an epidemic of mental illness.”
The book, which has spent 11 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, was panned in the journal Nature by Candice L. Odgers, a professor of psychological science in informatics at the University of California, Irvine. “Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt,” she wrote. “Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations.”
Dr. Odgers, who has been approached by so many journalists that she distributes a six-page summary of the scientific literature on the subject, has cataloged large-scale meta-analyses and reviews that have found social media use has small effects on health, among them a 2023 report by an expert committee convened by the National Academies of Sciences.
Kaynak: briturkish.com
