Examining the Potential Harmful Effects of Social Media on Young People

Wednesday, July 3rd, 2024 -- 8:00 AM

(Siddhant Pusdekar, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) Alarm bells have been going off for some time about the harmful effects of social media on young people, everything from cyber bullying to body shaming to online predators and more.

According to Siddhant Pusdekar with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, this year, at both the national and state levels, educators and lawmakers have been trying to convert their concerns into action.

In addition there have been smaller scale efforts to curb some of the worst impacts of cell phone use in Wisconsin, but these vary from school to school. And then on June 17, the U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy called for a health warning label on social media sites, like the ones found on tobacco products.

In an op-ed for the New York Times, he expressed hope that a warning label would remind parents and kids about the mental health risks of social media. Is any of this going to work? Could it have unintended consequences? And is it overkill at a time when cellphones are often used in the classroom?

Some experts are skeptical about the effectiveness of such broad approaches. Heather Kirkorian is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies how kids and parents interact with digital media.

Warning labels are good for raising awareness, she said, but “my sense is that most teens and parents have heard about the potential risks and are aware that that might be a concern."

Treating social media “as analogous to cigarettes is unhelpful, because there are potential benefits of using social media as well, and I don't think we can make that same argument for smoking cigarettes."

According to Kirkorian, a more useful approach is using research to inform best practices around social media use. That means understanding “what kinds of activities on social media might be the riskiest, and which kids might be most at risk for those harms versus those that would benefit,” Kirkorian said.

There are some clearly harmful communities, ones that promote anorexia and body shaming content, which can have a harmful impact on youth. Many offline social dynamics also play out in the online world, Kirkorian explained, so kids "who get bullied offline are most at risk of getting bullied online."

A survey anonymously filled out by Wisconsin high school students shows that certain identity groups are particularly at risk. In the Wisconsin Youth Risk Behavior Survey conducted by the Department of Public Instruction in 2021, high school students who identified as female were twice as likely to say they experienced online bullying as males, and LGBTQ+ students were twice as likely as all other students.

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