I want to support the rising tide of concern for how social media may harm kids, yet I remain skeptical of warning labels.

In case you missed it, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy earlier this week published an op ed in the New York Times that called for warning labels on social media platforms because they’re “associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.” He was quoted in a New York Times news article on the topic and interviewed on the newspaper’s “The Daily” podcast.

In other words, he was effective in getting the word out, and the flashy gold sleeve stripes of his uniform were fairly ubiquitous in all our video feeds.

He also received backup from California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who doubled down on Murthy’s statement by calling for more smartphone restrictions in schools. Students, the governor said, “should be focused on their studies—not their screens.”

Murthy was careful to clarify that an advisory he released last year outlining specific policy changes for social media platforms (as well as best practices for users) remains his priority for what will make the most difference in the lives of American children. He wasn’t hanging his white hat on a warning label as the best or only solution. But I doubt its effectiveness even as a partial solution.

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First, let me emphasize a few of my bedrock beliefs when it comes to modern mobile tech and social media:

1. I appreciate that I could enjoy a childhood free of the distractions of social media yet also take advantage of its creativity in my career as an adult: I’m biased, but I still believe Gen X has been the generation perfectly situated on the timeline of digital technology. In childhood we played “Oregon Trail” and coded graphics on Apple computers but avoided having our social awkwardness and bad choices monitored by a camera in everybody’s hand. We also didn’t have to tolerate our smartass immature peers insulting us on various mass publishing platforms.

2. I learned a lot about social media by being part of the problem as my industry helped fuel its takeover of our everyday lives: I lived through the early misguided euphoria over social media in the news industry, when newsrooms fed the growth of tech platforms by giving away their content to chase more eyeballs beyond their core geographical audience. Ultimately, journalists were engaged in undermining their own business model as the mirage of a new-tech payoff faded away. It was left to a very few titles (such as the New York Times) to aggregate a large enough digital footprint to make the new media math profitable.

3. I’ve grown increasingly skeptical about the basic utility of social media in all our lives: The return on investment for participating in social media as a content creator remains a dicey proposition at best. This past week also saw publication of a Wall Street Journal story that pairs nicely with the conversation around the surgeon general’s op-ed: “Social-media influencers aren’t getting rich—they’re barely getting by.” Nearly half (48%) of those pursuing income on platforms earned $15,000 or less annually. And then there’s the vast majority of us who have given years of free labor to Zuckerberg, Musk, and the rest in a bid for visibility, branding, networking, whatever. I hope that all of us have gotten gradually better at knowing precisely when and how we get our money’s worth—by exchanging our attention, personal data, etc.—from social media.

So, I’m not rejecting a warning label for social media because I worship these platforms and believe we’re bound to innovate our way to some great tech utopia. If we left everything to the great minds of tech, they’d probably dream up more “innovations” like “Instagram Kids.”

I just grew more skeptical this past week with all the chatter, including many comparisons being made between social media and cigarettes. If warnings arguably worked for addictive smokes, why not for vile tweets and the threat of predators on social video platforms? However, directly ingesting tar, nicotine, and other chemicals is different from consuming information and entertainment, no matter how much we may feel a computer algorithm can be a more pernicious delivery mechanism than a small paper tube.

Whenever a warning label is proposed for content or a platform I think not of cigarettes but of the PMRC, the Parents Music Resource Center in the 1980s. The spouses of U.S. senators (such as Tipper Gore) launched a campaign for rock albums to be given ratings similar to movies. Hearings were held in Congress and debate ensued on talk TV shows of the era such as “Donahue.”

The result? It wasn’t until 1990 that, after various states had flirted with a hodgepodge of warning labels on records, the standardized “parental advisory explicit content” sticker in stark black and white began appearing—voluntarily, coordinated by the Recording Industry Association of America—on some albums, starting with 2 Live Crew’s “Banned in the U.S.A.”

Unsurprisingly, the warning label was disproportionately slapped on hip-hop albums compared to other music genres.

Predictably, it became more a badge of honor for music artists and a draw for fans rather than any sort of warning or deterrent. (Who wanted to buy a gangster rap album in the early ‘90s without an explicit content sticker? No sticker meant it was too tame!)

Today the music warning label endures more as a cautionary tale about the limits of any such attempt to contain creativity rather than as a model for other uses such as social media.

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Meanwhile, kids are great at detecting hypocrisy, which also makes me want different approaches to smartphone bans in schools. What if any politician calling for such a ban said they’d put their money where their mouth is and also impose a policy of no smartphones in the room for any of their official meetings or proceedings in their capitol building—making exceptions for press conferences and the like? I acknowledge the differences in a developing adolescent brain versus that of an adult, but let’s be real that social media is intruding on and rewiring all of us. If you want the kids to pay attention, show them how serious you are by modeling as well as mandating behavior.

Not that I’m convinced a smartphone ban is practical even in schools; screens and studies basically are synonymous these days, depending on how you handle the screens.

Maybe you’re reading this on your phone right now while ignoring somebody in your household? We all tend to be part of the problem.

From that PMRC debate in the 1980s, the words of Frank Zappa in his congressional testimony still ring in my head:

“I have got an idea for a way to stop all this stuff and a way to give parents what they really want, which is information, accurate information as to what is inside the album, without providing a stigma for the musicians who have played on the album or the people who sing it or the people who wrote it. … If you consider that the public needs to be warned about the contents of the records, what better way than to let them see exactly what the songs say?”

I realize the limits of this comparison; the lyrics of an album by a single artist are finite compared to the endless flood of content on a social media platform. But I still see a viable plan of attack: Let’s stay focused on something like nutrition labels for social media rather than warning labels. Think more in terms of the side of a cereal box rather than a sticker on a record album.

Let’s get better at specifying and clarifying all the ingredients for social media consumers—from how our data is collected and and marketed to how hackers and predators have been combated through specific safety measures.

How about more transparency and flexibility around controlling our feeds and connections on social media?

The answer here is information, accurate information—not yet another label or pop-up window with a boilerplate dire warning.

Don’t worry: If you roast me on social media for anything I’ve said here, I’m OK with it. At least you can’t take away my peaceful offline childhood.

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Parental advisory: Think nutrition, not…