Surgeon General means something like “Medical Inspector of the United States“. That doesn’t sound very dramatic at first and sounds like a better plumber, but according to Wikipedia, this office is the top “management function of the United States Public Health Service” and they are responsible to the US government for the public health service. I’m not sure if you can equate the Surgeon General with the German Minister of Health, but at least in the US he’s “the nation’s doctor”. His voice carries weight.
In a document published yesterday, he expressly warned against the use of social media, especially in the context of the teenage mental health crisis, and made suggestions for the regulation of social media, the development of new framework conditions and, ultimately, tips for use by concerned parents . The 19-page PDF is a summary of the scientific findings to date and contains instructions for politicians, parents, educators, scientists and doctors to deal with the diverse psychological phenomena that are caused by the new close-meshed digital networking and design decisions of the platform operators.
In addition to demands that are often heard, such as data transparency for scientists and regulatory authorities, the proposals also include the introduction of binding access restrictions for young people or the creation of “Tech-Free Zones” by parents and teachers. I’m unsure whether access restrictions for young people, at least from a certain age, don’t create more problems than it eliminates, since kids are simply excluded from what is now an essential part of human sociality, but I’ve been calling for “tech-free zones” for years Schools and think screens in class are a terrible idea. Nevertheless, age-related access restrictions are a means of regulation that must be discussed openly and cannot be dismissed in the context of anachronistic-techutopistic network activism with references to a free Internet.
Ultimately, the document also means a public admission of what scientists like Jonathan Haidt have been documenting for a long time (and social media experts and bloggers like yours truly for a much longer time). Haidt just published paper on a study showing that the age of first smartphone exposure correlates directly with declining mental stability in adulthood, and this is just one of many clues that led to this remarkable US Surgeon General’s document . In my opinion, the findings from the now hundreds of psychological studies are overwhelming, and the previous statements of the Socmed apologists, here as an example Tom Chivers on Semafor, do not really impress me.
I’ve been writing about the psychoactive aspects of social media for about ten years, here on Piqd for about six years — one of my first posts was about the psychological effects of increasing the visibility of others on social media. I first became aware of these effects with the advent of what is now the well-known clickbait phenomenon in the early 2010s, and I suspected even then that long-established yellow press manipulation techniques could be scaled and applied in digital media environments in a whole new way, with unprecedented potential for a targeted manipulation of human behavior.
These possibilities of manipulation have only multiplied over time and at the latest with the victory of Donald Trump and the debate about “Internet outrage” they acquired a political dimension. It was clear to me that these possibilities of manipulating the human psyche do not stop at journalism and the media, but rather influence the psychology of all people, but I had not expected that this development would primarily and most clearly affect female teenagers, even if it did in retrospect appears obvious for many reasons, which it would take too long to list here. Let’s leave it at that: In my opinion, the warnings that have hit the mainstream so far and are also listed in this document from the Surgeon General are only the tip of the iceberg.
For example, a recently published study found a connection between the well-known online disinhibition effect, according to which the Internet disinhibites us in relation to other people, and the emotional exaggeration of our online communication: We exaggerate the emotional states we communicate online due to the lack of secondary means of communication such as body language or eye contact. In the context of an attention economy, this study alone has the potential to explain many of the well-known phenomena such as the culture of outrage that has been spreading for years or excesses in the formation of online mobs. This is just one of many, many studies that paint a pretty clear picture of the effects of social media, and when I write above that I think social media is psychoactive, I don’t mean that as a metaphor: social media are drugs.
For these reasons, I am very pleased that a weighty voice like that of the supreme Surgeon General of the US government, who is ultimately responsible for the public health care of the entire population, is now publicly demonstrating with this document that the phenomena described and their causes are not just a few bogus theories from a few early bloggers like me, or a few scientists to ignore, but serious health risks to the psychological makeup of society as a whole.