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California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan <\/a> a new bill, <\/a>, that would require social media companies to put a warning label on their platforms to disclose their mental health risks.<\/p>\n Citing social media platforms\u2019 \u201charnessing of addictive features and harmful content for the sake of profits,\u201d Attorney General Bonta says that consumers should have access to information about platforms that could impact their mental health. The current bill lacks detail on how much information these warning labels should have or how they should appear, but mentions the Cyberbullying Protection Act and the Online Violence Prevention Act as possible precedent for such a requirement. Those bills required social media platforms to disclose their cyberbullying reporting features in the terms of service, and clearly state whether they have a way of reporting violent posts for users and nonusers on the platform, respectively.<\/p>\n Bonta and Bauer-Kahan\u2019s new bill follows <\/a> (Bonta included) that called for Congress to require a surgeon general\u2019s warning label on social media. The US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy proposed the idea himself in an essay <\/em><\/a> in June. A surgeon general\u2019s warning label requires congressional action to actually be put in place, but could prove effective in changing behavior <\/a>, according to Murthy.<\/p>\n You can trace a lot of the recent commotion around children and social media to <\/a> on <\/a> that the US Surgeon General published in 2023. The advisory claimed that social media could \u201chave a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents\u201d and that \u201cchildren and adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of mental health problems.\u201d A warning label is unlikely to completely fix things and social media isn\u2019t the sole cause of all children\u2019s problems, but labels are another level that can be pulled to change things.<\/p>\n A wider reaching Texas bill that required social media companies block teens from seeing \u201charmful content\u201d <\/a> in 2024, but requiring social media warning labels, especially given <\/a>, seems much more feasible. Mental health impacts are just one of the risks children face online, though. <\/a>, there\u2019s still mass surveillance to deal with, too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n