What’s Missing from the Surgeon General’s Social Media Advisory
July 2023
by Vicki Harrison
As we heard from the U.S. Surgeon General several weeks ago, the role of social media in the lives of children and adolescents is complex, fraught with potential harms and benefits, and something that we all must play a role in safeguarding. For those of us who work closely with young people and have been actively engaging on this issue for years, we are grateful to our national leadership for elevating its importance and calling for increased action. However, there is one critical strategy that was missing from the Advisory’s suggested actions that I’d urge Dr. Murthy to add to his otherwise strong set of recommendations. It is to encourage young people to speak out and for the rest of us to directly incorporate the opinions, ideas and advocacy of young people themselves in the policy, design and education for which he is calling.
In an effort to meet the immense mental health needs of youth, a number of promising efforts have engaged youth directly as subject matter experts through a shared decision-making approach (youth and adult allies sharing power). As youth-driven initiatives such as GoodforMEdia, Design It For Us, Healthy Online Platforms for Everyone (HOPE), allcove and many others show, there is a groundswell of youth voices that are informed, engaged and making an impact. It’s high time we fully open our board rooms and chambers to their wisdom and experience. Not only do we owe it to them, but they are an undertapped resource that is bursting with insights that just might help us untangle some of the many challenges the current state of social media poses.
Just a few days before the Surgeon General’s Advisory was announced, our GoodforMEdia team held a workshop at the Stanford d.school, led by high school and college-aged youth, uplifting youth ideas and working with industry, academia and adult allies to tease apart the policy language being debated and recently passed in states like California, Utah and Montana. They considered the privacy tradeoffs that might be necessary in order to verify their age and tailor more developmentally appropriate content, what increased parental monitoring might mean for them, and what they’d like to see more of on the social media platforms which they frequent. Fed up with the powerlessness they have felt for too long with many aspects of social media, they eagerly engaged in these discussions, put forth strong ideas, recorded testimonials to share, and were grateful to be asked for their opinions.
Centering the very people one is trying to serve (or support and protect in this case) with a given design is a core principle of design thinking, a problem-solving and product-development approach that is highly respected and applied in Silicon Valley. So why then, when we are gravely concerned about protecting young people’s best interests on social media, are we not going directly to the source and involving them? Not as research subjects, but as experts, leaders and co-designers. They are wise, innovative and motivated – ideal co-creators. And as a generation that has had no choice but to navigate social media largely on their own, they’ve earned a seat at the table.
What’s perhaps more notable is that if we are truly interested in improving youth mental health, one of the most powerful things we can do is increase youth’s sense of agency and impact on things that directly affect them. Through our weekly GoodforMEdia youth advisory group meetings exploring how to help their peers navigate social media and maintain good mental health at the same time, our young leaders develop their own critical thinking skills and a sense of empowerment that they say has transformed their relationships with social media. This sense of agency and control is a protective strategy that can support their mental health. As affirmed in research from our colleagues at the Stanford Social Media Lab, people who believe they have more control of their social media use experience enhanced wellbeing and less psychological distress -which brings us back full circle to the problem our Surgeon General is calling on us to solve. The youth in our recent workshop agreed with Dr. Murthy that their health and safety should be prioritized above all other interests, including profit or free speech. That common ground is an important and fundamental place to start. So let’s offer them a seat at the table and keep listening.
About the Author:
Vicki Harrison, MSW is Program Director for the Stanford Psychiatry Center for Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing where she develops and implements youth-centered programs that support the mental health and wellbeing of young people ages 12-25.