Opinion: NY must address youth social media addiction before it’s too late

Anyone who’s a parent knows about the following scenario: your kid asks (or perhaps begs) you to buy them a toy. You look at the price to make sure it’s within your budget. You read the box to make sure the parts and pieces are safe for their age. You ask your child if they really, truly want it – even though you know they’ll outgrow it quickly. If everything checks out? You buy the toy, hand it over, and don’t think much about it again.

But what if that toy came with the risk of addiction, heightened levels of depression and anxiety, increased likelihood of self-harm and, even, in some cases, the possibility of suicide? Surely, no parent would even consider buying such a toy for their child.

And yet, this is the case with smartphones and social media. 

We are in the midst of an unprecedented youth mental health epidemic, and all signs point to smartphones and social media as the primary culprits. 

According to a Pew Research survey, 95% of teens use social media, with a third of them admitting that they use it “almost constantly.” On average, 13-year-olds are spending a minimum of 4.1 hours each day scrolling, liking, posting and reposting on different social media platforms.

As a reporter covering the rise in teen and tween suicide rates, I came across countless examples of harmful content being fed to children; content that made them depressed and anxious, that encouraged young girls to develop eating disorders, or that traumatized them – including videos of car crashes, beheadings and self-harming. 

It became clear to me that our children were being exposed to extremely harmful content online and not enough people were talking about it. Now, with the popularity of smartphones and the increasing use of technology during the school day, this damaging content is being fed into our kids’ brains and follows them around 24/7. 

The U.S. Surgeon General warns that adolescents who spend more than 3 hours a day on social media are at twice the risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes. Therefore, it should be no surprise – though no less disturbing – that anxiety and depression among kids has skyrocketed over the past decade. 

Most troubling, suicide is now the second-leading cause of death for children ages 10 to 14, killing more kids those ages than every type of cancer combined.

Social media companies are incentivized to keep our kids on their platforms – to boost content that promotes and fuels addiction to their apps – because the more time we all spend scrolling, the more money they make. These platforms relentlessly target our youth with hidden algorithms and commercial messages that exploit their emotions for profit. And with the rise of AI, the promoted content will only get more and more extreme. 

Additionally, smartphone and social media addiction has greatly interfered with healthy child development. The science is clear that face-to-face interaction and in-person socializing are core elements of a nourishing, balanced childhood. Social media addiction displaces these essential experiences and makes our kids more isolated and less prepared to succeed in the real world.

In March, I started Mothers Against Media Addiction, a movement of moms, dads, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and anyone who cares about children to join together to create a world where real-life experiences remain at the heart of a healthy childhood.

Since our launch, MAMA and its members have been sounding the alarm: We cannot wait any longer to address the problem of media addiction among our young people.

In the 1980s, parents came together to combat the scourge of drunk driving and the victims it was claiming, creating Mothers Against Drunk Driving and spearheading education and legislative campaigns to put an end to the deadly epidemic.

It’s long past time for us to treat social media addiction the same way. 

Right now, New York lawmakers can take bold, meaningful action to address this crisis by passing the NY Child Data Protection Act and the SAFE for Kids Act. 

Co-authored by Senator Andrew Gounardes and Assemblymember Nily Rozic, these bills would protect children and teens from being targeted by addictive algorithms on social media and also ban online sites from collecting and selling our kids’ data. 

If enacted, these safeguards would help set an example as model legislation for states all across the country to adopt. 

For months, Big Tech companies have been frantically lobbying the Legislature against these bills, just as they have fought tooth and nail in other state capitols and in Washington to kill any effort to rein in their influence and implement safeguards on their platforms. 

Taking on a multi-billion dollar industry isn’t easy. But parents like ourselves will never stop fighting to protect our children. 

With the legislative session coming to a close this week, state lawmakers must act now. With our kids experiencing so much harm and distress from what they are seeing on social media, we can’t afford to delay action any longer. We can’t keep selling our children’s hearts and minds for profit.

Let’s pass these bills and move one step closer to giving our children back the childhood they deserve.