We must treat social media like the toxin that it is

Change can come at you fast, and every new development brings unintended consequences.

Industrialization brought pollution. The internet upended industries and trade. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is already changing the way we work — and being called an extinction-level threat by some of the very people who built it.

Unfortunately, we tend to appreciate the consequences of these shifts mainly in hindsight, and our policies race to catch up.

We now live in a world forever changed by social media. We’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly. And we’ve found that the greatest unintended consequences are the ones experienced directly by our children.

As a parent of three young children, I see every day how young people have been conditioned to reach for their for phones and devices. The fault lines of this tectonic shift are in my home, and homes like it throughout our nation.

Children encounter a slew of perils through their screens, often invisible to the grown-ups around them. These include bullying, body shaming and eating disorders, alongside growing feelings of isolation, loneliness and anger. They can fester and grow into full blown anxiety, depression and suicide.

These perils multiply because of the unchecked and boosted algorithms that social media corporations use to capture more and more of our — and our children’s — attention. They promote content that can amplify and inflame negative emotions, sometimes with catastrophic results. Some of the world’s most talented engineers are dedicated to keeping young people on social media as much as possible, when their brains and bodies are in a critical stage of social, emotional, behavioral, and neurological development. We are just beginning to understand the impacts, which may last the rest of their lives.

The view of social media is not exclusively the risks above. Real communities can form online, and virtual kinship can help young people explore the world and their own identities. It is clear that social media is now a part of our lives, and so all-out bans or prohibition is neither realistic nor advised. But the evidence is clear that unregulated, unfettered access to all kinds of social media and its content is uniquely harmful to children. Much as toys have package safety inserts for children and parents, we need information and protections for social media.

Young people themselves are in a bind. They are aware of what’s happening but under immense pressure to use social media, and they are naturally skeptical of regulations designed only by adults over their social lives. We need policy that forces social media companies to control their out-of-control algorithms and abandon their quest to capture every waking minute of children’s attention.

Inaction has helped lead us into a youth mental health crisis. In 2021, 38 percent of NYC high schoolers reported feeling so sad or hopeless during the past 12 months that they stopped doing their usual activities — a rate that was significantly higher for Latino/a and Black students than their white peers. Over the past 10 years, rates of suicidal ideation among high schoolers increased by more than 34 percent.

It’s time to address this crisis head on. We must collect and analyze even better evidence of social media’s impact on young people’s mental health. We must lay out strategies for how we’ll protect young people from the harms of social media. We must rework regulations and, where appropriate, hold companies accountable for the damage they continue to inflict.

That is why the City of New York and its Health Department recently hosted a summit on this topic, “Protecting Our Kids After the Pandemic: NYC’s Role in the National Crisis of Social Media and Youth Mental Health.” It brought together more than 100 experts from across the country, as well as young people themselves, leveraging the unique role of the nation’s largest and most diverse city in crafting local solutions to a national problem. The conversations were real, and direct from our teens and parents who are on the front lines of this battle every day.

This meeting is an outgrowth of a larger mental health plan launched by the Adams administration, which prioritizes youth mental health as one of three key pillars to addressing the second pandemic of mental illness engulfing our city and our nation. We have no higher priority than protecting and promoting the health of the city’s young people.

We can’t just launch services for kids who have been harmed by social media. We must also protect them from harmful exposure in the first place, as the Surgeon General recently recognized. Public health authorities, like ours, must treat social media as a toxin, ever present in our daily environments, to which our children currently have uncontrolled exposure.

Social media may be digital, but its effects can be just as damaging as tobacco, lead paint, or air pollution. One of the primary roles of public health has been to reduce exposure to these toxins through education and harm reduction, and sometimes through litigation, regulation and enforcement, thereby preventing disease, staving off suffering, and mitigating societal costs.

There is no reason to treat social media any differently.

Continuing our current course, without sensible guardrails for social media, is courting disaster. Rather than leaving young people at the whims of the corporations racing to monetize their attention, we must empower them with information and alternatives. Parents, teachers and community stakeholders all need tools to protect our children — and hold social media companies to account.

Social media has undoubtedly changed our lives. But we still have the power to determine what a healthy online environment looks like, especially for young people. That will require a public health response that treats social media like the toxin it is. If not, our inaction will become a deadly historical lesson that we learn at our children’s expense. The time to act is now.

Ashwin Vasan, MD, Ph.D., is commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.