Senate bill proposes warning for social media

FINDLAY — A new bill currently making its way through the 119th General Assembly of Congress aims to put a warning label on social media platforms to warn users of their mental health side effects. The "Stop the Scroll" bill was introduced to the Senate in May and will, if passed, force certain social media platforms to warn users of the mental health side effects of usage before allowing them to proceed to the site. According to the language of the bill, "Each time a user accesses the covered platform of the provider while physically located in the United States, (the platform will) clearly and conspicuously display a mental health warning label." Furthermore, the bill requires users to then acknowledge the warning before proceeding, but the warning will reappear after each continuous hour of usage. Co-sponsor of the "Stop the Scroll" bill Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio, said in a release that "as more and more children and teens use social media, a warning label should be prominently displayed highlighting the potential harms of using social media platforms. The Stop the Scroll Act would help young people grasp the mental health risks that come with social media." A similar version of the bill was introduced to the 118th U.S Congress in 2024, but did not advance beyond introduction to the Commerce, Science, and Transportation committee. Dr. Christian Steiner, a psychiatrist with the Blanchard Valley Psychiatric Center of Northwest Ohio in Findlay, agrees the bill will be helpful for raising awareness for mental health issues and the implications of social media usage. "Overall, I think it's probably a good idea," Steiner said. "It alerts people of the addictive potential (of social media) ... We're always using addiction to talk about things like heroin and cocaine, but this is actually true for cell phones as well." Steiner defines an addiction as "having a craving or strong desire" for something to the point that it becomes hazardous. "I think (cell phone and social media usage) fall under the criteria of addiction. I think it's very much ingrained in kids," he said. Because most people always have their cell phone with them, many of which are probably smartphones with easy access to the internet, "they're used in large amounts over a longer period of time than what people anticipated," he said. Some have likened social media usage to a consistent feed of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that gives feelings of pleasure. In a 2018 article from The Guardian, Sean Parker, founding president of Facebook, said "Whenever someone likes or comments on a post or photo, we give you a little dopamine hit," and associating those pleasurable feelings with being on social media is what starts the addiction. Eventually, Steiner claims, we get desensitized to the dopamine bumps from real-life events so we seek the dopamine elsewhere, including from the internet. Steiner used a hunter/gatherer metaphor to illustrate the concept. "You go out, you hunt, you gather. You look for, let's say, berries. You get some pleasure from getting those berries. But what the electronic media does is it also gives you that sense of finding berries when you find the magic coins in an online game. Then your desire to go out and be productive and do things in the real world is very much hampered," he said. Social media can be almost impossible to avoid completely, so "how do we limit something we still use?" Steiner asks. "Unless we use kerosene lamps and stay away from everyone." Though the social media bill's warning label idea represents a step toward working on a solution, some aren't so sure it's the answer. Joseph Bayer, Ohio State University associate professor and director and researcher of the Mobile Cognition Lab, said there may be negative implications that some people may be more vulnerable to than others, but the science doesn't match up that a warning label would be beneficial to everyone. "For some people it's neutral and a lot of evidence actually shows that for most people, it's probably not a huge effect, in terms of negative or positive," Bayer said. "Compared to cigarettes … there's more direct causal evidence that if you smoke, your odds of cancer go up." Not so with social media, Bayer said. There are challenges to even simply obtaining data on how social media affects mental health. According to Bayer, there isn't enough evidence to classify it as a psychological condition. "That doesn't mean that there aren't people who are having negative consequences" because of social media usage, he clarified. It just means, from a scientific perspective, it's not seen as a definite disorder like alcoholism or drug addiction may be. Another challenge may be that while many may identify themselves as "addicted to social media," because of colloquial usages of the term "addiction," they may not exhibit clinical symptoms of addiction for a medical diagnosis. "The idea that (social media) is bad for every person is not supported by science," Bayer said. There are increased risks for some populations, he said — including adolescents, more specifically young women, and those that may already be predisposed to mental health complaints like anxiety and depression — but he doesn't think "putting a sticker on it will change things." In lieu of a warning label as proposed by the Stop the Scroll bill, Bayer argued that better data is needed to truly know more about the implications of social media usage. "When these technologies are so amorphous and you see that so many people have so many different effects, I think it's hard to centralize that into a clear story," he said. "There needs to be clear guidelines on how data is recorded from the (social media) companies so we're able to actually track the implications that these technologies are having." The bill was referred to the committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.