Senior doctors didn’t say social media was as bad for children as smoking

In May, as the government was consulting the public before announcing its social media ban, several reports claimed that the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges (AoMRC) had said social media was as “bad” or as “dangerous” to children as smoking.

While an AoMRC statement did compare social media with smoking in some respects, this isn’t what it said.

In a submission to the government’s consultation on children and technology, the academy mentioned smoking four times:

• “[Unfettered technology exposure] ranks alongside smoking and wearing seatbelts in cars as a unifying force for the medical profession.”
• “And while there are those that may argue about a correlation rather than direct evidence of causation as some did in the sixties and seventies with smoking and seatbelts, there is, I think, an overwhelming consensus that excessive screen time can harm children and young people.”
• “[Lack of data on patients’ technology use] means we have no understanding of the true impact to [children’s] health in the way we might understand their relationship with alcohol, smoking or exercise.”
• “We said the same things about seatbelts. We said the same things about smoking. In both cases, the causal mechanism was hiding in plain sight — and the population paid the price while we didn't pursue the argument robustly.”

In other words, the submission said that smoking and social media are both unifying forces among doctors, and that the current lack of evidence for the harms of social media resembles the lack of evidence that once delayed their opposition to smoking.

It did not say that using social media harms children as much as smoking does.

Full Fact asked the AoMRC about this, and it confirmed our interpretation of the document.

Reuters, ITV News, the Manchester Evening News and Sky News all said the submission called social media “as bad as” smoking, while the Independent and the i paper said it was “as dangerous”.

None of these are an accurate description of what the AoMRC said. Full Fact contacted all the organisations involved, and the Independent subsequently corrected its article. Sky News told us its journalists would bear the distinction in mind in future.

Independently, BBC News also changed the headline on its report, which originally said “Social media as bad for young people as smoking, top doctors say” to make a different point: “Starmer vows to act on social media after meeting bereaved parents.”

What doctors suspect—not what they know

A front page article in The Times on 26 May also misdescribed another aspect of the AoMRC document.

It said: “Half of the 454 doctors surveyed by the academy said that at least once a week they treated a child whose mental distress or physical harm was linked to online content.” The same claim also appeared in articles in the Guardian and the Telegraph.

But this is not quite right. The survey in question asked doctors: “How often have you seen a child/young person where you suspected the presentation could be linked to exposure to screens and devices?”

So the responses recorded these doctors’ suspicions of a possible link to online content in their patients’ problems—not a link itself. Indeed one of the AoMRC’s recommendations is that patients should be screened for online harm when their medical history is collected, so that data on any actual links can be recorded.

It’s also important to make clear that this survey was a “snapshot study”, not a scientific poll. The AoMRC confirmed with us that the questions were made available for doctors who wanted to respond to them, and the responses were not weighted to make them better reflect the profession as a whole.

This means the results tell us the views of those doctors who wanted to express them, and they are not necessarily representative of doctors in general.