Can Warning Labels On Social Media Protect Teenagers?

FRIDAY, Sept. 4, 2026 (HealthDay News) — Your teen has been flipping through Instagram for nearly an hour when they get a pop-up that says:

“SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Social media is associated with significant mental health harms for children and young adults.”

What are the odds this will stop their scrolling?

Pretty good, according to a new study that’s being published days after a landmark $18 billion settlement with social media giant Meta.

Slapping warning labels on social media platforms has the potential to protect teenagers and young adults from harm, researchers report today in the journal JAMA Health Forum.

Young people said they felt particularly swayed by warnings aimed at their mental and physical health, results show.

“Teens and young adults consistently reported that they felt the warning messages we tested would reduce their social media use,” senior researcher Dr. Thomas Robinson, a professor in child health at Stanford University, said in a news release.

The study lands just over a week after Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion in a state-led lawsuit over the harmful effects of platforms like Facebook and Instagram on younger users.

As part of the settlement, Meta agreed to fundamental changes aimed at users younger than 18. These include a two-hour daily usage limit only parents can lift, the disabling of extreme makeup and cosmetic surgery filters, and tighter age verification measures.

The settlement does not include warning labels, but four U.S. states have passed laws mandating such warnings, researchers said in background notes.

However, there’s been little research into the effectiveness of these warnings, said lead researcher Anna Grummon, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Stanford.

“We haven’t known what warnings for social media should say, or if they’re promising for changing behavior,” Grummon said in a news release. “Sometimes, subtle changes to warnings really matter.”

California’s will go into effect first, on Jan. 1, followed by Colorado, Minnesota and New York, researchers said. Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania have proposed similar legislation.

The California warning label will state: “The Surgeon General has warned that while social media may have benefits for some young users, social media is associated with significant mental health harms and has not been proven safe for young users.”

The rest of the states are still working out what their warnings will say, researchers said.

“Our data suggests these warnings could work, so it’s worth spending time to get the language just right,” Grummon added.

For the new study, researchers tested social media warning labels with more than 1,000 young people. About half were teenagers 13 to 17, and the rest young adults 18 to 29.

The team developed warning messages focused on a number of health topics — social media addiction, negative body image, sleep disruption, depression and anxiety, and mental health harms in general.

Researchers also tested California’s warning, and a warning stating that social media has not been proven safe for young people.

Examples include:

• SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Using social media causes sleep problems. This is bad for your health.

• SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Using social media increases your risk of depression and anxiety.

• SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Social media use can make you feel worse about your body.

The team compared these messages against one that urges users to take a screen time break — “Hey, you’ve been scrolling for a while now. Consider taking a break.”

Participants rated all warnings that mentioned health effects — except the addiction warning — as more effective than the one suggesting a screen time break.

The most effective were those about overall mental health harms, depression and anxiety.

“If I were to speculate, I would say that these are harms that resonate with people,” Grummon said. “People may think, ‘That’s right, I can see that happening to my friends or to me,’ and these are outcomes people care about.”

The California warning also tested well, even though it’s longer and more complex, researchers said.

“We talked to the people who created the bill, and they told us the rationale behind it,” Robinson said. “It’s not the message we would have designed, but we think we understand why it performed well, and it was meant to stand up to legal scrutiny. All these bills are in litigation, being challenged by the social media industry.”

Interestingly, teens and young adults responded similarly to the warnings, researchers reported. They had expected to find differences between the two age groups.

“If you’re a few years older, it makes a big difference in your experience with digital media since the landscape is changing so quickly,” Robinson said. “But our teen and young adult participants consistently said they felt these messages would reduce their social media use.”

Researchers next will conduct more extensive tests to see if the warnings do in fact lead to less social media use.

“With substances like tobacco and alcohol, we find, on average, that well-designed warning labels change behavior,” Grummon said.

“But social media is a totally different product from cigarettes or alcohol or sugary drinks, where you just put the warning on the product and it lives there,” Grummon said. “Social media laws are written so that these warnings are basically pop-ups. We need to find out more about how that changes behavior.”

More information

Johns Hopkins Medicine has more on social media’s effects on children and teens.

SOURCES: Stanford University, news release, Sept. 4, 2026; JAMA Health Forum, Sept. 4, 2026; The New York Times, Aug. 26, 2026