Warning Labels
The US Surgeon General recently penned an op-ed in the New York Times in which he made the case for warning labels on social media platforms.
In essence, he believes these networks can have negative effects on their users—young people, in particular—and that this potential harm justifies overt warnings, similar to those found on cigarette packaging (and other tobacco products) in the US and other countries.
These warning labels are meant to make clear to those who use the worrisome product that there are science-backed risks associated with them, and the hope is that over time this knowledge will reduce their use and prominence, especially with those aforementioned young people.
Setting aside the debate about social media’s impact on young people for the moment (and there is quite the debate, with some research indicating it may cause or amplify all sorts of psychological issues, while a comparably small amount suggests those concerns are overblown, and that social media might even help teens in some ways), it’s worth asking whether and how these sorts of warning labels even work; after all, people (including young people) still smoke, and while tobacco smoking has seen a serious decline in the US (and other nations where such labels are used) for years, addictive tobacco products (and others that contain nicotine) remain popular.
The theory behind using these labels is that, first, they raise awareness of dangers inherent in some products amongst those who might not otherwise know about or understand those dangers, and second, they counter marketing efforts that might otherwise make these products more desirable to consumers (and thus, more common).
That latter ambition has in some cases been achieved by implementing “plain packaging” policies that disallow the use of branding elements like logos, appealing imagery, and even colors that might help cigarette sales.
While it could be argued that there’s something aesthetically interesting about plain-white little boxes with small black lettering amidst shelves of colorful images, fonts, and packages, other benefits typically associated with marketing efforts (like customers visually associating themselves with brands they perceive to be cool) seem to be truncated by these sorts of rules.
Some research suggests that this change, alone, can make cigarettes seem to taste bad—suggesting a reversal of the well-documented tendency of nicely packaged (or otherwise perceptually “expensive-seeming”) products to taste better—while also killing market-share for expensive brands (concomitantly upping sales for value brands), which in turn reduces prices (and thus, profits) for the big-name brands, which can over time reduce the incentive to invest further in selling to customers in a given region.
So removing branding and simplifying packaging, alone, seems to bear fruit for agencies wanting to cut back on cigarette sales, but what about the warnings that often replace those other elements?
There’s evidence that health warnings raise consumer awareness of the risks associated with smoking, and some, but less evidence that it can impact their behaviors as a consequence.
In other words, when smokers are questioned about their knowledge regarding the health consequences of this habit, more of them understood the risks after these warnings were slapped on the cigarettes they bought, but few of them reported changing their behaviors: they knew what they were doing to their bodies, but didn’t perceive the risks to be worth giving up the habit.
Warning labels bearing frightening or disturbing images of people suffering from smoking-related cancers may be somewhat more effective in this regard, though evidence on impact is mixed, and some evidence suggests the consumer’s level of nicotine dependence (how addicted to the substance they are when they’re deciding whether to make a purchase or not) may influence outcomes in this regard—folks who are already hooked probably won’t change their habits, but folks who are just starting out and who are not yet fully addicted may do so.
One more interesting finding is that the introduction of warning labels, and especially graphic warning labels on cigarette packaging seems to increase the amount of what’s called “pack-hiding behavior” in smokers, which means they’re more likely to hide their package of cigarettes when around other people.
This suggests that these labels make cigarettes and smoking a bit more embarrassing in some contexts, which in turn suggests the perceived social benefits of smoking have decreased, which may then go on to shape smoking behavior in the future (evidence for that latter potentiality is currently lacking, though).
It’s an open question whether similar warning labels placed on social media platforms would be effective, as the degree to which these findings would translate to digital products is unknown.
The impact such labels have on already-addicted people being in question, it could also prove to be an issue that many teens are already well-and-truly addicted to social media, which means these labels could possibly help keep younger kids from latching onto them in a few years, but they might not have much of an impact on those of us who are already enmeshed in social network-related habits and norms.