West Michigan's Morning News

Social Media Warning Labels

The US Surgeon General continues to seek a tobacco-like warning for social media. Dr. Lisa Strohman, world renowned psychologist and expert on online safety joins WMMN to discuss how social media is impacting everything from teens to the amount of time we spend at restaurants.

Duration:: 4m
Broadcast on:: 10 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

We've had a couple weeks to think about just how something like a Surgeon General warning on social media would work. Since West Michigan's morning news Steve Kelly Brett Keita and Lauren Smith, remember when the Surgeon General suggested that? Lisa Strowman, Dr. Lisa Strowman is on the live line, world renowned psychologist, expert on online safety. Thanks for doing this today. Absolutely. Happy to be here. So is it dangerous enough to warrant something like this? Let's start there. Well, I think it is dangerous enough. I mean, I've been a practicing psychologist for 20 years and I've had teenagers in my office, I've attended funerals. I've helped families get through some of the darkest days and it's been such a silent epidemic that it's refreshing to hear someone bring this to the front of the media. So, Dr. Strowman, I'm a parent of two kids that luckily are not on social media yet, but this is something that really does terrify me. And I feel like there's a conversation of, okay, well you have to be the parent versus sometimes this can be a really hard thing to parent. Would a warning label actually work? What can we do to help with this? I mean, Lauren, it's the biggest issue that I come across with parents. The warning label is a good talking piece, I think the Vivek Murthy's idea is as a parent, we need everybody to be aware of this, but that will push it the same way that tobacco is, right? If you go to any sort of counter in a mini mart and see somebody order a pack of cigarettes, I've never seen someone turn it away because the box showed up on the counter but had a warning label on it. So it's very similar with kids. Like the tech industry itself is actually putting up like, "Hey, you've been on this long enough," and then you can just exit out of it. So it's not something that we can just put a warning label on and it will change it. And as a parent myself with two teenagers who do not have social media, it's like, you know, it's streaming, it's actually watching them try to swim upstream. And at this point at 16 and 17, it's like watching them try to swim up a waterfall. They are not the norm and it's very difficult as a parent every single day because it's always a challenge. Dr, it's funny because I don't think anyone ever felt we'd get to where we were with smoking, right? I mean, where now you can't smoke in public places, restaurants. I remember when that first happened and people were like, "So appalled," like, "What?" And then all of a sudden, it just slowly became a part of society. I'm not saying this is going to be the same way, but can you imagine if we went to kind of those extremes like, "Hey, no social media. Are you in a restaurant?" Or, no, you know what I mean? It'll be interesting to see because that has been done with cigarettes and obviously the results have been very positive. Yeah, I think it should come. I have friends that are in the restaurant industry and they said that social media and the use of cell phones in the restaurants has actually created a 20% drop in their bottom line because the amount of time people are taking pictures of their food, sending those, posting them. It just adds everything. And if you can imagine in one restaurant, if it's a home restaurant, you lose the whole turnover in a night, which is thousands of dollars for a restaurant. So it's very insidious into so many areas that we don't even think about. Maybe if we consider it a first step to a big problem because this really won't change stupid parents, and I don't mean that to be mean-spirited, but there are some out there that just don't pay any attention to what their kids are doing. Right. I think that it's a part of looking at where we are now. Gen Z is growing up online. They've never, ever had a day that they were born that Alexa didn't exist or theory that they could get help on. And the parents use those tools to help them parents. And so it's almost like this grand plan by the tech industry to be like, "Hey, if we just get them all hooked really early, then we can just keep them hooked all through life." And so they didn't really think through the mental health impact of that, of self-harm and substance abuse and the predatory behaviors that occur online. And so I think it's up to us as a society, and a warning label is that it's like, "Hey, there's some dangers here. It can be great. We can use it for tools, but tech as a toy can be very dangerous." And that's what we have to start alerting the public to and creating tools that can give parents and schools and kids the ability to manage it on their own. Dr. Lisa Strowman is a world-renowned psychologist and expert on online safety. Thank you for your time this morning. Absolutely. Thanks for talking about this.