Opinion The Third Edit: Using social media is injurious to health. But the young will adapt

Cigarettes and social media, it is now becoming clear, have quite a bit in common. Both are addictive, put out by huge corporations that make massive profits from them. The difference — perhaps fortunately — is that it has taken much less time to realise that the latter is “injurious” to health. Earlier this week, a committee of 50 experts asked the Spanish government to place caps on smartphone use by minors and have pop-up warnings for certain apps. In France, too, there have been calls for such action and in June, the US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy demanded that social media carry tobacco-like warning labels.

The disenchantment with social media has been remarkably quick. It took more than a century from when the first commercial cigarette-making machine was patented in 1844 in Mexico to the first packets carrying health warnings in the US in 1966. By contrast, the oldest social media site is the now-defunct Six Degrees, launched in 1997. It is arguably only with the advent of high-speed internet in the late 2000s that the beast we know today first bared its fangs. One reason for this is the political impact social media has had — as a campaign tool, it has been widely used and often, maligned globally but especially in the US. The more clear and present danger, though, is the impact it has on mental health, particularly of young people.

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Behind the calls for warnings is a more fundamental question: How do you deal with addiction? As any smoker will attest to, once hooked, the warnings rarely act as a deterrent. However, studies have shown that they help in reducing the number of “new” addicts. There’s also another factor that policymakers — most of them, at their youngest, are old millennials — may not understand about a generation born as “digital natives”. The young are not so restless about social media as their elders — and more adept at navigating its dangers.