I am hearing a lot of people who are not young discuss this topic and I would really like to hear from young social media users whether or not this would have any effect on them.

The article brings up this:

Critics of the proposed warning label seized on this point. They ask, “Where is the series of definitive scientific studies to prove that social media and phone use destroy teens and adolescents?” They want the same kind of proof that eventually jolted our public health response to tobacco: blackened lungs, cancer research and thousands dead.

I don't agree with the critics personally, but if I were their age and I saw a Surgeon General's warning about social media when I logged in, I might wonder why they're doing this when there's no conclusive evidence of harm.

I should also point out that Surgeon General warnings on cigarette packages began in 1966. You can see here that there is definitely a steady trend line downward, but it had started long before the warnings began and the warnings don't seem to have been a big factor, since there wasn't a huge drop once they started. It went down for women after it had been going up, but it had already been going down with men and I am not convinced there is a strong correlation with the packaging and women.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4843a2.htm

I wonder if its going to be all social media or just arbitrary companies who the government decides aren't healthy. Both sound silly. Because either we're going to end up with warnings on almost every site with social aspects, yes including the entire fediverse, or we're relying on the government to tell us what's harmful and not without conclusive studies.

Well yeah. I mean, the big companies hire psychologists to conduct user studies to maximize time on device, and they model their user experience after variable reward schedules from slot machines. Seems obvious that they're nefarious.

I just have no idea how you can effectively regulate big tech.

At every corner, the fundamental dynamic of big tech seems to be: Do the same exploitative, antisocial things that we decided long ago should be illegal... but do it through indirect means that make it difficult or impossible to regulate.

If you change the definition of employment so that gig-work apps like Uber become employers, they'll just change their model to avoid the new definition.

If you change the definition of copyright infringement so that existing AI systems are open to prosecution, they'll just add another level of obfuscation to the training data or something.

I'm glad they're willing to do something, but there has to be a more robust approach than this whack-a-mole game we're playing.

Edit: And to be clear, I am also concerned about the collateral damage that any regulation might cause to the grassroots independent stuff like Lemmy... but I think that's pretty unlikely. The political environment in the US is such that it's way, way more likely that we just do nothing -- or a tiny little token effort -- and we just let Meta/Google/whoever fully colonize our neurons in the end anyway.