Yet Another Massive Study Says There’s No Evidence That Social Media Is Inherently Harmful To Teens

At this point, I really have to question the seriousness of anyone who claims that the evidence shows that social media is bad for kids. We're now reaching a point where the research is increasingly overwhelmingly pointing in the other direction. I've posted it before, but I'll post this list again:

• Last fall, the widely respected Pew Research Center did a massive study on kids and the internet, and found that for a majority of teens, social media was way more helpful than harmful.
• This past May, the American Psychological Association (which has fallen for tech moral panics in the past, such as with video games) released a huge, incredibly detailed and nuanced report going through all of the evidence, and finding no causal link between social media and harms to teens.
• Soon after that, the US Surgeon General came out with a report which was misrepresented widely in the press. Yet, the details of that report also showed that no causal link could be found between social media and harms to teens. It did still recommend that we act as if there were a link, which was weird and explains the media coverage, but the actual report highlights no causal link, while also pointing out how much benefit teens receive from social media.
• A few months later, an Oxford University study came out covering nearly a million people across 72 countries, noting that it could find no evidence of social media leading to psychological harm.
• The Journal of Pediatrics recently published a new study again noting that after looking through decades of research, the mental health epidemic faced among young people appears largely due to the lack of open spaces where kids can be kids without parents hovering over them. That report notes that they explored the idea that social media was a part of the problem, but could find no data to support that claim.
• In November a new study came out from Oxford showing no evidence whatsoever of increased screentime having any impact on the functioning of brain development in kids.

And we can go back further too. There was a study in 2019 that couldn't find any evidence of social media being bad for kids.

But now we have yet another study to add to the list. And it's a big one. It comes from the National Academies of Science, entitled Social Media and Adolescent Health. Eleven different academics helped put the paper together, along with another seven staff members who worked on it. This isn't just some random report that a couple academics put together. It was a massive project. And it shows.

But the key finding:

The committee's review of the literature did not support the conclusion that social media causes changes in adolescent health at the population level.

That's not to say that everything is great. As we've detailed, and as many other studies have shown, there certainly are situations where some individuals who are already dealing with certain mental health issues may find them exacerbated on social media. And there are some reasonable concerns about some kids getting so focused on social media that it takes away from sleep or studying. And the report makes this clear as well.

As this (and many other) reports make clear, the issues here are more complex, and any focus on just banning social media outright would likely do more harm than good:

Studies looking at the association between social media use and feelings of sadness over time have largely found small to no effects, but people with clinically meaningful depression may engage with social media differently. Some research has proposed that this relation is circular, with people with more symptoms of depression spending more time using social media and social media use predicting risk of depression. At the same time, the relation between social media use and depression might vary among different demographic or identity groups. Among LGBTQ+ teens, for example, social media use is associated with fewer depressive symptoms but an increased risk of bullying.

The report notes that it would be useful to have access to more data, while also admitting (which unfortunately too many academics don't) that data access questions also come with certain risks:

It is difficult to determine what effect social media has on well-being or the extent to which companies are doing due diligence to protect young people from the more habit-forming affordances of their platforms, as companies retain extremely tight control on their data and algorithms. A general lack of transparency regarding social media operations has bred public distrust of the platforms and the companies that run them. Yet some of the companies' reluctance to share data is valid. Platform algorithms are proprietary, which can make obliging companies to share them seem unfair and uncompetitive. Social media companies also hold a great deal of information about ordinary people that could, in the wrong hands, be used for surveillance or blackmail. For these reasons, the development of technical standards to benchmark platform operations, transparency, and data use requires the coordination of a range of stakeholders.

The report then has a bunch of recommendations, and notably they do not include things like age verification, or aggressive parental controls, or cutting off kids' access to social media (which are the main policies we see being proposed around the globe). Instead, the recommendations are much more reasonable and nuanced. It includes things like much more digital media literacy training in schools starting as early as kindergarten, and running through all years of schooling.

It does suggest that social media companies should develop more standardized systems for reporting abuse and harassment, as well as managing those reports, adjudicating them, and following up on them. It does suggest that the social media companies should be more open to working with researchers to share data, but doesn't seem to be suggesting mandated access, just good faith efforts," which seems more reasonable than out and out mandates.

Overall, this is yet another study that shows these issues are complex and nuanced, and that much of the media reporting (and political messaging, including by the US Surgeon General) goes way beyond what the data actually shows.

I'm also pleased that, unlike the misleading reports that note an increase in teen suicide starting from the mid-2000s (that some academics have used to blame social media), this report goes back to the 1970s (we published an identical chart - it's literally the same chart - last year as well) which shows that teen suicide rates were much higher in the 90s before declining sharply in the early 2000s, and then starting to go up over the last decade or so.

Anyway, as we've been saying for the longest time, the general idea that social media is inherently harmful to teens has been debunked so many times it's simply malpractice for anyone - especially a policymaker or journalist - to say otherwise at this point. There are real concerns for some teens. But, at the same time, it's pretty clear that social media is also helpful for many teens.

We should be looking at ways to help those who end up having problems with it, but that appears to be a very small percentage. But instead of looking for targeted treatments, we're seeing overblown nonsense suggesting it's harmful across the board.

Hopefully this study, like so many others, will finally get across the idea that it is not, in fact, inherently harmful.