Social media harms kids, Biden says

By Ben Leonard, Carmen Paun and Erin Schumaker

Kids are glued to their screens these days. | Getty Images

President Joe Biden offered his clearest statement yet on Tuesday that he’s no friend of the social media giants.

His broadside followed the release of a surgeon general report calling for urgent action by policymakers, tech companies, researchers, families and youth to better understand how apps like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube affect kids’ mental health, POLITICO’s Rebecca Kern reports.

What’s Biden doing about it? Creating a task force led by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Commerce Department to study the effects.

The task force will:

— Review existing tech industry efforts to promote health and safety

— Provide best practices to help parents and guardians protect their kids’ health and safety online

— Offer recommendations to the industry by next spring for designing safer and more privacy-protective products for kids

Biden’s also calling on Congress to pass legislation to strengthen protections for children’s privacy, health and safety online.

What’s happening on the Hill? A bipartisan bill from Sens. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Katie Britt (R-Ala.) would require parental consent for teens under age 18 to access social media accounts and the websites to verify the age of all users.

Another bill — the Kids Online Safety Act — was reintroduced in Congress this session. It would mandate that companies build their products with kids' safety in mind.

And lawmakers have also reintroduced a bipartisan bill — COPPA 2.0 — that would expand online privacy protections for kids between ages 13 to 16.

The industry responds: An advocate for tech companies defended the benefits of social media for young people and said that age-verification laws pose privacy risks.

“As lawmakers debate new digital safeguards, we shouldn’t trade away user privacy by requiring everyone to verify their age or shut off access to supportive online communities for young people,” said Adam Kovacevich, CEO of trade group Chamber of Progress, which counts Facebook parent Meta and Google among its corporate partners.

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Here’s a free way to improve your mental health: listen to birds’ songs. Two studies published last year show that hearing or seeing birds could help heal our minds, the Washington Post reports.

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Today on our Pulse Check podcast, your host Ben talks with Megan Messerly about the Mayo Clinic’s successful lobbying campaign against a health care affordability bill in Minnesota.

Wearable tech could grow in 2023, but AI is hotter.

The artificial intelligence and data analytics sectors in health care are set to grow significantly this year.

That’s what more than 225 of 300 respondents from health tech companies, the government, health care providers and insurers told surveyors from venture capital firm Venrock.

By contrast, fewer than half as many respondents predicted “material growth” in telemedicine.

And respondents were even less sure about growth in other areas.

Twenty-nine percent said wearable devices and Medicare Advantage would see material growth in the next year, and 28 percent said the same for accountable care organizations and value-based care. Twenty-seven percent said the same for digital preventive care programs.

The respondents predicted the lowest growth prospects for:

— Direct-to-consumer services (20 percent)

— Medicaid (18 percent)

— Electronic health records (11 percent)

— Health insurance (10 percent)

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New brain research offers insights into chronic pain. | Getty Images

Understanding how chronic pain affects brain activity could help in the development of new treatments.

New research represents a step toward that goal.

How’d it work? Scientists from the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of Southern California say they got a look at how pain appears in brain activity after implanting electrodes inside four people’s brains.

The researchers asked the subjects about their pain several times a day and recorded their brain activity. They then employed machine learning to determine the patients’ “chronic pain state.”

In a separate experiment, researchers examined how the brain responded to pain from heat. They could predict pain response in two of the four patients.

“This suggests that the brain processes acute vs. chronic pain differently, though more studies are needed given that data from only two participants were used,” the National Institutes of Health, which funded the studies, said in a release.

Researchers hope the findings can help develop new treatments to change brain activity to ease chronic pain.

Why it matters: Chronic pain afflicts about 1 in 5 Americans, and researchers are looking for new treatments. Opioids alleviate pain but are addictive and have fueled an overdose crisis.

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