from the this-article-may-contain-actual-evidence dept
You may have heard that yesterday the Surgeon General of the US, Vivek Murthy, announced that Congress should mandate “Surgeon General warnings” on social media, saying that it is harmful to kids. Over at the Daily Beast I went into great detail about just how far from the actual science this suggestion is.
Hell, his recommendation even contradicts Murthy’s own report that he released a year ago. That report made it clear how helpful social media is for many kids:
Yet, in Murthy’s statements this week, he completely ignores all of that evidence. He ignores any possibility of benefits from social media, not with evidence but with a few very limited anecdotes. These include concerns about his own two kids (who he notes are too young to be on social media anyway) and a few random stories of kids being bullied online.
But bullying has always existed. And yes, bullying online can take on more malignant forms due to scale and reach, but we should be focused on the specific conduct, not the clearly incorrect argument that social media is somehow inherently so harmful that it needs a warning.
What frustrates me most of all about this is that Murthy should know better than to base such big decisions on his own feels and anecdotes, especially when nearly all of the evidence disagrees with his beliefs. Murthy is supposed to be following the actual science, not getting swept up by moral panics.
In his op-ed, Murthy compares social media to cigarettes, but it’s utter nonsense to compare speech to something you actually consume. As we’ve noted in the past, social media is not lead paint, or cigarettes, or even chocolate. It’s speech.
And, importantly, speech is protected under the First Amendment. In the Daily Beast piece, I point out that Reagan’s Surgeon General C. Everett Koop kicked off the moral panic about video games in 1982 by arguing that they were harmful and addictive to children. Decades later, that moral panic resulted in California passing a law putting warning labels on video games, which was struck down by the Supreme Court for violating the First Amendment.
It strikes me as quite something that Murthy would choose to use this week to push his unconstitutional attack on free speech, when the Supreme Court is likely to rule, either this week or next, on the case bearing his own name, regarding whether or not he violated the First Amendment in trying to stifle voices on social media.
The US government should win that case for a whole long list of reasons that I’ve explained in the past, because there remains no actual evidence in the record of actual coercion by the government. But, either way, it’s still odd to pick this particular time to then push a clearly unconstitutional attack on the First Amendment in the days leading up to that decision.
In the Daily Beast, I conclude by noting that C. Everett Koop quickly admitted that his remarks regarding video games and kids were off-the-cuff, not based on science, and should not be seen as reflecting administration policy. If Murthy wants to be taken seriously, he should review the actual science and admit to his own error.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, free speech, mental health, social media, surgeon general's warning, vivek murthy
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