HF1289 SF1807 is awaiting committee assignment.
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Essay
Bill HF1289, SF1807 Essay
Kristin Xiong
IB HL Global Politics Yr1
Ms. Harder
November 24, 2025
Bill HF1289, SF1807 Essay
All legislatures should vote yes on HF1289, SF1807 because it would be beneficial in many ways. The purpose of this bill is to guide others, mostly adolescents, away from potential risks of social media. The risks of social media are cyberbullying, sleep, low self-esteem, loneliness, addiction, and body image issues (Marshal-Seslar, 2023). This bill helps raise awareness for all ages that social media can affect your mental health and a timer promotes healthier habits.
To begin with, this bill educates all ages that social media can have an influence on your health. It gives a warning label each time a user accesses the social media platform. It issues most of the mental health impacts. This means that those who see this warning label most likely acknowledge the risks. Moreover, the warning label includes the website and telephone number of a national suicide prevention and mental health crisis hotline system. This encourages those in need to get help (Jeong et al., 2024). Therefore, this helps individuals set boundaries and build strength to overcome the affects.
Secondly, a pop-up timer promotes healthier habits. Having a timer that appears every sixty minutes would be helpful for the youth because it reminds them of how long they’ve been on the social media platform. Additionally, it reduces excessive usage, which helps to overcome distractions. Hence, the youth would become more engaged in real life activities from reading to exercising. The benefits of hobbies are reducing stress, increased happiness, energy, skills, connections, and more.
Social media can affect your health because it triggers the brain’s reward system by releasing dopamine (Bounds, 2024). Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that gives you pleasure and motivation. Since social media can release these hormones, it can make you addicted to the feeling making you on the social media platform frequently (Cleveland Clinic, 2022). This is unhealthy because it can lead to you craving for your phone. The things someone may crave for is the amount of likes, messages, and notifications they can get throughout the day.
Two drawbacks of my bill are desensitization, and the “boomerang effect” (Concordia University, 2025). Primarily, desensitization is very true in this situation because if social media users repeatedly see the same warnings, eventually, it can just become something people see daily, like being left in the background, and they could ignore it. The boomerang effect applies too because once users realize that they can just always exit the warning with no consequences, gradually, the warning won’t have a meaning anymore. Usually, adding warnings that aim for awareness aren’t enough. But, it wouldn’t hurt to have a warning up for just in case, especially if no one will take notice of it.
In conclusion, all legislatures should vote yes on my bill because it would be beneficial for the youth. The motives were to educate others that social media can affect you mentally and promote healthier routines. Though there can be drawbacks like desensitization, we can still care for the warnings to help guide us with our usage of social media. At last, this bill won’t help everyone, but it will help those who want to uplift themselves.
References
Bounds, D. (2024, May 10). Social Media’s Impact on Our Mental Health and Tips to Use It Safely. UC Davis Health. https://health.ucdavis.edu/blog/cultivating-health/social-medias-impact-our-mental-health-and-tips-to-use-it-safely/2024/05 Date Accessed November 25, 2025.
Cleveland Clinic. (2022, March 23). Dopamine. Cleveland Clinic. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/22581-dopamine Date Accessed November 25, 2025.
Concordia University. A warning about warning labels on social media | News - Concordia University. (2025, July 17). https://www.concordia.ca/cunews/main/items/opinions/2025/a-warning-about-warning-labels-on-social-media.html#:~:text=Similarly%2C%20a%20warning%20about%20social,encourage%20reflection%20and%20self%2Dregulation. Date Accessed November 24, 2025.
Jeong, H., Hyeon Woo Yim, Lee, S.-Y., Park, M., & Ko, W. (2024). The effectiveness of a suicide prevention program in primary care clinics supported by community public health resources: A difference-in-differences analysis. Psychiatry Research, 334, 115803–115803. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2024.115803 Date Accessed November 25, 2025.
Marshall-Seslar, A. (2023, March 8). 15 Dangers of Social Media & How to Avoid Them — McMillen Health. McMillen Health. https://www.mcmillenhealth.org/tamtalks/dangers-of-social-media November 23, 2025.
Solomon, K. A. (1995, January 1). Warnings: When do they help, when do they hurt? RAND. https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P7892.html#:~:text=The%20intent%20of%20a%20warning,warn%20against%20every%20potential%20danger Date Accessed November 23, 2025.