by Corinne Purtill, Los Angeles Times

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

To understand the path forward in regulating social media, it's helpful to look to a transformative technology from the previous century: the car.

A car is an essential tool for getting places we want and need to go. It's also an exceptionally powerful one that can be dangerous if handled irresponsibly.

We require education and training for people who want to drive them. We insist that companies build in safety features, which are updated over time as research and technology advance.

And when young people come of age and want to get behind the wheel, "we would never dream of allowing them near a car where we didn't have safety standards for the vehicles and where we didn't have education for the adolescents," said Dr. Sandro Galea, a Boston University physician and epidemiologist.

"But if you think about it," he said, "that's exactly what we do with social media."

In a report released by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, Galea and 10 other researchers lay out a plan for what society might do instead to improve adolescents' interactions with social media.

The report acknowledges the distressing rise in depression, suicide and poor mental health among U.S. adolescents, as well as the corresponding growth in their social media use.

Correlation, however, is not the same thing as causation. After a thorough review of the available research on the subject, the researchers said they were unable to find evidence to support at this time broad restrictions or bans on young people's access to the vast array of tools and platforms that can be called social media.

"The temptation to draw causal inference and to call for rapid action around social media is strong," the report says. "And yet, in careful deliberation and review of the published literature, the committee arrived at more measured conclusions."

There is strong evidence to conclude that certain features of social media can be harmful to young users, the study team wrote. Algorithms designed to maximize engagement can drive users' attention toward harmful content and disinformation, warping their sense of reality. Time spent on devices can come at the direct expense of exercise, study and sleep.

Social media also creates opportunities for exploitation and harassment that simply didn't exist before vast swaths of the population were connected by pocket-sized computers.

But the social media category encompasses many different types of online discussion and play, and many of these offer real benefit to the young people who use them, the authors wrote—particularly teenagers who feel marginalized elsewhere.

Rather than back the kind of "broad-stroke bans that have been proposed by other entities in recent years," the committee determined that "a judicious approach to protect youth mental health is warranted," Galea wrote in the report's introduction.

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