Former Surgeon General says Congress has failed to protect children’s mental health

Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy accused Congress of failing “in its responsibility to protect our kids” from the harms of social media.

Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy accused Congress of failing “in its responsibility to protect our kids” from the harms of social media and called on lawmakers to “step up and act now” in an interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that aired Sunday.

Murthy, who served as surgeon general during the Obama and Biden administrations, said he would specifically like to see Congress pass legislation that would force social media apps to include warning labels about their harms to children and would allow for more data transparency from social media companies so that researchers can more accurately study the effects of the internet on kids.

The former surgeon general compared social media to cars, pointing to the introduction of safety features like seat belts, air bags and crash testing decades ago.

“Those have reduced the number of deaths,” Murthy told “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker. “We’ve got to do the same for social media, because what we’re doing now, Kristen, is we’re basically — it’s the equivalent of putting our kids in cars with no seat belts, with no air bags, and having them drive on roads with no speed limits and no traffic lights. And that is just morally unacceptable.”

Congress has tried in recent years to pass legislation to better regulate social media platforms and their interactions with children, with the Senate passing the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0) last year with strong bipartisan support.