THE Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs and Governance convened a remarkable gathering at the World Trade Centre in Kingston last Tuesday. The launch of Guyana’s ‘National Consultation on Social Media and its Consequential Effects on Children’ marks the first step in answering a distress signal that should have every citizen with a beating heart rushing to the emergency room.
Gathered were several government ministers, parents, educators, pastors, imams, pandits, child protection advocates, and policymakers. The urgency of their presence underscored the framing of Minister Gail Teixeira: “child protection comes first. No compromise.”
What brought them together is hardly an isolated issue. The evidence is so staggering that the U.S. Surgeon General, the country’s top public health official, is calling for tobacco-style warning labels on social media platforms. The World Health Organisation (WHO) is advocating no screen time for children under one year and no more than one hour per day for children between two and four. The American Psychological Association, the National Academies of Science, and the UK’s National Health Service, institutions that don’t alarm easily, have all issued formal warnings.
And why is that? Because the data can no longer be ignored. Teenagers who spend more than three hours per day on social media face double the risk of experiencing symptoms of anxiety and depression. Among the heaviest users, one in ten expressed suicidal intent or self-harm thoughts in the past year, compared to one in twenty among the lowest users.
Facebook’s own internal research, revealed by whistleblower Frances Haugen, admitted that the platform “makes body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.” Haugen was a data scientist and former Facebook product manager who leaked thousands of internal company documents in 2021. Her disclosures revealed that Meta (formerly Facebook) consistently prioritised profits over user safety and ignored its own research on the societal harms caused by its platforms.
A 2025 analysis of 83 studies, covering 55,440 participants, confirmed Haugen’s leaks: the more time young people, especially girls, spend on social media making appearance comparisons, the more likely they are to develop body dissatisfaction and eating disorders. The bottom line – social media algorithms are rigged in favour of your daughter’s engagement, not her self-esteem.
Social media is rewiring our kids’ brains, and neuroscientists have been sounding the alarm for over a decade. The platforms, whether TikTok, Instagram or Facebook, are engineered to exploit the brain’s dopamine reward system. It targets the same neurochemical pathway implicated in addiction. Each notification, each like, each new piece of content spikes dopamine levels. Over time, the brain adjusts its baseline downward, requiring ever more stimulation to feel normal.
The natural rewards of childhood, such as accomplishment, friendship, play, and curiosity, gradually feel less satisfying by comparison. Stanford psychiatrist, Dr Anna Lembke, compares social media addiction to using cocaine. The prefrontal cortex of adolescents, which controls their impulses, long-term reasoning, and regulates their emotions, doesn’t mature until they’re about 25 years old. In essence, what tech-savvy engineers have done is insert a dopamine slot machine into the brain of every child with a smartphone.
The first casualty is sleep. Drawing on data from over 122,000 participants, the Journal of the American Medical Association confirmed that electronic screen use before bed significantly reduces sleep duration, delays sleep onset and worsens sleep quality. Just two hours of exposure to a screen’s blue light can suppress the sleep hormone melatonin by 55 per cent.
The downstream effects compound relentlessly. Sleep deprivation worsens anxiety and depression. Anxiety and depression drive more social media use. More social media use deepens sleep disruption. We have handed our children a machine that, when used the way they are actually using it, creates a self-reinforcing cycle of cognitive and emotional harm.
An Oregon State University study of over 1,500 adults found that those in the highest quarter of social media usage were more than twice as likely to be lonely, regardless of age, gender, marital status, or income. Social media replaces the face-to-face, non-verbal interaction that human beings evolved over millennia to depend on. Instead, a like has replaced an actual hug; a comment thread is now accepted as a conversation, and a follower is considered a friend.
Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist whose book The Anxious Generation triggered global debate on this issue, argues that between 2010 and 2015, precisely the years when smartphones began saturating adolescent life, rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and self-harm spiked sharply across the Western world, in patterns that transcend race, class, and culture.
And just as our civil society is beginning to grapple collectively with social media, artificial intelligence has arrived with a new and deeper set of implications. That’s a topic for another column.
The government is inviting us to participate in this conversation; the least we can do is attend. Speak plainly to your children. Know what they are watching and recognise that your child’s mind is not a marketplace. Our children did not choose to be born into a digital world. We, on the other hand, chose to be their parents, their teachers and leaders. That choice comes with a responsibility that no consultation can fulfil on our behalf.
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.
