There have been increasingly loud public warnings that
social media is harming teenagers’ mental health — most recently from the US
surgeon general — adding to many parents’ fears about what all the time spent
on phones is doing to their children’s brains.
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Although many scientists share the concern, there is little
research to prove that social media is harmful — or to indicate which sites,
apps, or features are problematic. There is not even a shared definition of
what social media is. It leaves parents, policymakers, and other adults in
teenagers’ lives without clear guidance on what to be worried about.
“We have some evidence to guide us, but this is a scenario
where we just need to know more,” said Jacqueline Nesi, a psychologist at Brown
University, in Providence, Rhode Island, who studies the topic.
What counts as social media when it comes to teenagers’
health?
The surgeon general, Dr Vivek Murthy, warned last month that
social media carried a “profound risk of harm,” but he did not name any apps or
websites. His report acknowledged that “there isn’t a single, widely accepted
scholarly definition of social media.”
Most studies look at platforms with user-generated content,
where people can interact. But that raises a lot of questions. Does it matter
if teenagers see posts from people they know or don’t know? Does it make a
difference if they post or just view? Do multiplayer games count? Dating apps?
Group texts?
YouTube illustrates the challenge. It is the most popular
site among teenagers by far: 95 percent use it, and almost 20 percent say they
do so “almost constantly,” Pew Research Center found. It has all the features
of social media, yet it hasn’t been included in most studies.
Some researchers speculated that YouTube may not have as
many detrimental effects, because teenagers often consume it passively, like
TV, and do not post or comment as often as they do on other apps. Or,
researchers said, it may carry the same risks — it offers endless scrolling and
algorithmic recommendations, similar to TikTok. There is no clear data either
way.
What do we not know?
Reviews of the existing studies on social media use and
adolescents’ mental health have found the bulk of them to be “weak,”
“inconsistent,” “inconclusive” and “a bag of mixed findings,” and to be
“weighed down by a lack of quality” and “conflicting evidence.”
Research has not yet shown which sites, apps or features of
social media have which effects on mental health. “We don’t have enough
evidence to tell parents to get rid of a particular app, or cut it off after a
particular number of hours,” said Sophia Choukas-Bradley, a psychologist and
director of the Teen and Young Adult Lab at the University of Pittsburgh.
It is also hard to prove that social media causes poor
mental health, versus being correlated with it. Most studies measure time spent
on social media and mental health symptoms, and many, though not all, have
found a correlation. But other researchers say measuring time spent is not
enough: In these studies, it is unclear if time on social media is the problem,
or if it is time away from other things such as exercising or sleeping. And the
studies obscure, for instance, if someone is spending hours on screens to
escape mental duress or to seek support from friends.
A few studies have tried novel approaches around these
problems. One, early in Facebook’s rollout in the mid-2000s, compared college
campuses that had received access to it with those that hadn’t, and found that
its arrival had a negative effect on students’ mental health.
A carefully designed study — Project Awesome, at the
University of Amsterdam and Erasmus University, in Rotterdam, Netherlands —
looks at both the average effects of social media on 1,000 teenagers it surveys
and how they differ by individual, and follows adolescents over time. It has
found that time spent on social media is less of a factor than teenagers’ moods
while using it.
Other studies have used brain scans to show that when
adolescents looked at likes or frequently checked feeds, it activated brain
sensitivity to social rewards and punishments.
Why is there no more solid research?
Academic research takes a long time — often years to get
funding, develop studies, hire staff, recruit participants, analyze data and
submit for publication. Recruiting minors is even harder. By the time a study
is out, teenagers have often moved on to a different platform — much of the
research about specific platforms, for example, is on Facebook, which most
teens no longer use.
Tech companies have also not shared enough data to help
researchers understand their products’ impacts, the surgeon general’s report
said.
How could future studies be more conclusive?
Experts said they would like to see research that examines
specific types of social media content, and things such as how social media use
in adolescence affects people in adulthood, what it does to neural pathways and
how to protect youth against negative effects.
Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, psychologists who have
expressed great concern about social media’s effect on teenagers, have proposed
an experiment in which entire middle schools are randomly assigned to avoid
social media or not.
What should parents do in the meantime?
Experts agreed that waiting for research was not an option.
They also mostly agreed that some level of social media use was beneficial.
“There are harmful negative developmental implications to not using social
media at all, given this is where the social interaction happens,”
Choukas-Bradley said.
Researchers said social media rules should depend on
individual teenagers’ maturity and their challenges, and said addressing the
risks should also be the responsibility of tech companies and policymakers, not
just parents. They agreed on a few steps parents could take now:
— Set limits, especially around bedtime.
— Don’t give a young teenager a smartphone right away. Start
with a smartwatch or a phone without internet.
— Talk to your teenagers. Have them show you what they’re
seeing, ask them how it makes them feel, and discuss privacy and safety.
— Make a family screen-time plan that takes into account
which activities increase stress versus provide long-term satisfaction.
— Model responsible internet use yourself.
It’s not about monitoring certain apps, said Caleb Carr, a
professor of communication at Illinois State: “Instead, parents should engage
with their kids. Just like parents did presocial media, talk about being good
humans and citizens, talk about respect for others and themselves, and talk
about how their day was.”
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