California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Congresswoman Rebecca Bauer-Kahan are proposing a new bill, which would require social media companies to put a warning label on their platforms to disclose their mental health risks.
Citing social media’s “use of addictive features and harmful content for profit,” Attorney General Bonta says consumers should have access to information about platforms that may impact their mental health. The current bill does not specify how much information these warning labels should contain or how they should appear, but it mentions the Cyberbullying Prevention Act and the Cyberbullying Prevention Act as a precursor to such a requirement. Those bills required social media platforms to disclose their cyberbullying reporting features in terms of service, and clearly state whether they have a way to report violent posts to users and non-users of the platform, respectively.
Bonta and Bauer-Kahan’s new bill follows (with Bonta included) that wanted Congress to require a surgeon’s warning label on social media. US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy raised this idea himself in the story in June. The surgeon general’s warning label requires congressional action, but could prove effective in changing behavior, according to Murthy.
You can trace the recent chaos in children and social media to what the US Surgeon General published in 2023. The advice said that social media “may be at high risk of harming the mental health and well-being of children and young people” and that “children and young people who spend more than three hours a day on social media face a double risk of mental health problems.” A warning label is unlikely to fix things completely and social media is not the sole cause of all children’s problems, but labels are another level that can be pulled to change things.
A far-reaching Texas bill that would have required social media companies to block teenagers from seeing “harmful content” by 2024, but requires warning labels on social media, especially given , seems more likely. The mental health impact is one of the dangers children face online, however. , there are still many guardians to deal with.
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