Breaking Down NYC’s Social Media Public Safety Hazard Declaration

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New York City made history earlier this year, when it became the first major city in the United States to designate social media a public health hazard, due to the online platforms’ negative effects on the mental well-being of young people.

During his annual State of the City address on January 24, Mayor Eric Adams announced health commissioner Ashwin Vasan’s advisory making the designation official—part of the city’s larger plan to improve the mental health of all New Yorkers.

“We also need to protect our students from harm online, including the growing dangers presented by social media,” Adams said at the press conference. “Companies like TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook are fueling a mental health crisis by designing their platforms with addictive and dangerous features. We cannot stand by and let Big Tech monetize our children’s privacy and jeopardize their mental health.”

“Just as the surgeon general did with tobacco and guns, we are treating social media like other public health hazards, and it must stop,” he continued. “We must ensure that tech companies take responsibility for their products.”

The advisory says the rate at which NYC high schoolers reported experiencing feelings of hopelessness increased by more than 42 percent between 2011 and 2021, and that students identifying as Black, Latino, female, or LGBTQ+ suffered at disproportionately higher rates; the rate of suicidal ideation also increased during this time frame by more than 34 percent. And data from 2021 says 77 percent of NYC high schoolers spend an average of three or more hours of their school days in front of screens for reasons not related to schoolwork.

Health commissioner Vasan outlined recommendations for mitigating this epidemic, including implementing tech-free time and spaces for kids, monitoring their emotions during screen usage, delaying giving children their first smartphones, and adjusting the settings on social apps, such as by turning off notifications. His advisory also calls on federal and state policymakers to build on existing legislation; technologists and investors to advocate for safer design by social media companies; and all New Yorkers to hold those social media companies accountable.

But does any of this matter?

Jeremy Littau, an associate professor of journalism at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, questions how effective New York’s advisory will be.

“If the advisory says how to hold these tech companies accountable, how do you do that? That’s the role of the government,” he said. “That’s not so much the role of people, to publicly shame Facebook or Instagram into better moderation.”

Littau said he believes the question of responsibility comes down to government intervention versus a more libertarian approach, but that we really need both.

“Sure, we do need better education around what these platforms are doing to people and the ways in which they can harm us, but I don’t think we have easy mechanisms for harnessing and crowdsourcing the type of power that these companies respond to,” he said. “That’s only going to happen with government intervention.”

Littau is a proponent of reforming Section 230—a section of the federal Communications Decency Act of 1996 that protects online platforms from being held liable for content posted by users—to create requirements and incentives for social media companies to identify material that is threatening to or inappropriate for a certain group, and to provide ways to monitor and moderate it, in some ways like how movies and TV use rating systems. To do this, he said, platforms would need to have robust trust and safety teams (like the team Elon Musk infamously slashed at Twitter after acquiring the platform).

One of the biggest obstacles, however, is political will. Littau is pessimistic: He knows there’s sentiment in favor of regulating Big Tech on Capitol Hill, but the U.S. government’s two political parties are not aligned on the reasons to do so. Republicans are largely worried about censorship of conservative voices, he said, while Democrats are concerned about the harm that social media can cause.

“To pass a bill in the first place is going to require compromise in Congress, to see some value in the [other party’s] approach and do something that’s targeted but also limited,” Littau said.

Zach Rausch, an associate research scientist at the New York University Stern School of Business, has been studying adolescent mental health for the past four years. He has found that the rates of depression and anxiety among teen girls have been surging since the early 2010s, and that the rates of self-harm episodes, emergency department visits, and suicide have similarly increased across the English-speaking world. He points to social media as the most compellingly likely driver of these trends.

As for whom to saddle with responsibility for that, Rausch believes the issue requires collective efforts from kids, parents, schools, government officials, and platforms—and that New York’s advisory is a good start. “These kinds of public pressure campaigns are really important, and changing the norms and the way that we understand social media and society is really valuable, similar to how we changed our understanding of cigarettes not that long ago,” he said.

So, what’s the solution?

Rausch suggests four fundamental reforms to how we use social media: delaying giving smartphones to adolescents until they’re in high school (or 14 years old); raising social media platforms’ age requirement from 13 years old to 16; making American schools smartphone-free; and restoring play-based childhood. He defines the last item as “unsupervised time playing outside with a mixed-age group.”

“We’ve overprotected kids in the real world, and we’ve under-protected them online,” he said. “To solve that problem, we need to reverse both of those trends. We’ve been very libertarian-ish, standoffish in the virtual world, assuming that kids are no different from adults … and then in the real world, we’ve often done the exact opposite, where kids can’t even go outside unsupervised for 10 minutes because something bad might happen to them.”

So it comes down to more than just getting children off of social media, he said. It’s about getting them to physically connect in real life, as that’s where children learn to manage risks and emotions.

He, too, recognizes that enacting such changes will be an enormous undertaking, but Rausch believes the NYC advisory is a move in the right direction. He said he hopes the sentiment materializes nationwide.

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