December 6, 2024 04:00 IST
First published: December 6, 2024 at 04:00 IST
Cigarettes and social media, it is now becoming clear, have quite a bit in common. Both are addictions, put out by big corporations who make huge profits from them. The difference – perhaps fortunately – is that it has taken much less time to realize that the latter is “harmful” to health. Earlier this week, a committee of 50 experts called on the Spanish government to put caps on smartphone use by minors and put pop-up warnings on some apps. There have been calls for such action in France, and in June US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy took to social media to demand tobacco warning labels be carried.
Discontent with social media has grown remarkably fast. It took more than a century from the first commercial cigarette making machine in Mexico in 1844 to the first packet bearing a health warning being patented in the United States in 1966. In contrast, the oldest social network, the now defunct Six Degrees, was launched in 1997. Only with the advent of high-speed Internet in the late 2000s. The animal we know today first shed its fangs. One reason for this is the political influence social media has – as a campaign tool, it has been widely used and often maligned globally, but particularly in the US. A more obvious and present threat, however, is its impact on mental health, especially among young people.
Behind the calls for warnings is a more fundamental question: How do you deal with addiction? As any smoker will attest, once attached, warnings rarely act as a deterrent. However, studies have shown that they help reduce the number of “new” addictions. There’s another factor that policymakers—most of them, in their younger years, are older millennials—don’t understand the generation born as “digital natives.” Young people aren’t as anxious about social media as their elders — and are more adept at navigating its dangers.