AUSTIN, Texas — Texas lawmakers are looking at how to make social media safer for children.
House Bill 499, authored by State Rep. Mary Gonzales (D-Clint), would require social media outlets to put warnings on their platforms to tell users about the risk the apps pose to children’s mental health.
At a House Committee on Public Health hearing Monday, Gonzales said on average, children spend 3.5 hours on social media every day, increasing their risk of depression and anxiety.
What doctors are saying
Dr. Lauren Gamble, a hospital-based pediatrician, testified before the House Committee Monday on behalf of the Texas Medical Association and the Texas Pediatric Society.
She said nearly every day, she sees kids admitted to hospitals following self-harm or suicide attempts. Those patients include children as young as 8 or 9 years old.
“I see the harmful impacts of social media overuse every single day in my practice … I take care of kids in the hospital following suicide attempts at an alarming frequency. In my decade of practice, this has not only become more frequent, but the kids are younger and younger than they used to be,” Gamble said.
Gamble said some young patients have told her they were following trends they saw online, and parents routinely say they noticed a district and “dramatic behavior change as soon as their kid first had access to their cellphone or became active on social media platforms.”
Gamble said health and fitness trends in particular have had an impact on children’s experiences with disordered eating.
“Adolescent girls in particular, but also boys, are watching quote unquote ‘health influencers’ on social media and spiraling into restrictive eating patterns that can be deadly,” she said. “My patients tell me that they follow ‘what I eat daily’ trends and go to social media for grueling workout routines. By the time they get to me, these kids are so nutritionally depleted that their heart rates slow down and they can’t maintain their blood pressures. It can take weeks of nutritional therapy to restore even basic functions for these patients.”
Gamble said “almost universally” in her patients, social media has significantly contributed to the depression and anxiety “that has become unbearable, leading them to try to end their lives.”
“While more research is needed, we must hold social media companies accountable for their platforms’ addictive nature. We strongly advocate for restricting data mining of minors information,” Gamble said, adding, “Texas can be the lead in requiring parental consent for data collection, banning harmful targeted advertising, and ensuring transparency to protect children.”
What students are saying
A 15-year-old Austin high school student involved in the organization Students Engage in Advancing Texas (SEAT) also testified Monday. He said he has clinical depression, struggles with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and has engaged in self-harm and tried to take his own life. He said “social media played a big role in some of these struggles.”
He also said he too has seen the apparent cause-and-effect between trends on TikTok and Instagram and eating disorders.
“A lot of my friends at school … many of them suffer with eating disorders. And I’ve noticed that they want to get better, but when they feel that they want to change things or become better, they actually have folders on their social media app with videos that were posted on social media to encourage their eating disorder behaviors,” he said. “And so, social media platforms are allowing this content to be posted, which is actually encouraging young people to suffer more.”
Like Gamble, the student also said he has heard from parents who told him social media contributed to their children’s mental health issues and even to their deaths.
“I work a lot with parents that have lost their children to suicide. And one thing that every parent around the country has to say to me, that is common, is that social media played a role in their children’s loss,” he said. “Whether it be because of cyberbullying that led to it, whether it be because of what I mentioned with the eating disorders that they saw online and encouraging that kind of behavior, whether it be struggling with social isolation – social media touches all those different things.”
What happens next?
HB 499 was left pending in committee on Monday.
At a federal level, last summer, the U.S. Surgeon General also called on Congress to require social media platforms to put warning labels on their apps.