The New Yorker:

Lawmakers attempting to regulate children’s access to social media must decide whether bans or warning labels are the optimal route for keeping kids safe.

By Cal Newport

In 1881, James Bonsack patented an automated cigarette-making machine, and, in the years that followed, smoking became much more prevalent in America. Parents and reformers grew worried about kids picking up the habit. “It is not uncommon, it is said, to see a child not more than five years old smoking contentedly,” the L.A. Timeswarned in an article from this period. In response to this cultural trend, states began to pass measures that prohibited the sale of tobacco to minors. New Jersey established the first such law in 1883; New York followed suit three years later. By 1890, more than half the states in the union had passed similar restrictions.

Many decades later, in the nineteen-fifties, the Leo Burnett advertising agency helped invent Tony the Tiger, a cartoon mascot who was created to promote Frosted Flakes to children. In 1973, a trailblazing nutritionist named Jean Mayer warned the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs that the increasingly ubiquitous category of junk foods could be described as empty calories. He questioned why it was legal to apply the term “cereals” to products that were more than fifty-per-cent sugar. “I think they perhaps might more properly be called candy,” he said. Children’s-food advertisements, he claimed, were “nothing short of nutritional disasters.”

Mayer’s warnings, however, did not lead to a string of state bans on junk food. Laws were passed to improve the nutritional quality of school lunches; informational campaigns such as the food pyramid and the requirement for clear nutritional labelling were introduced. But advertising continued to target children, and consumers of all ages were free to buy and consume any amount of Frosted Flakes they desired. This health issue was ultimately seen as one that families should manage on their own.

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