Summary
A large study found no clear link between more social media use and worsening mental health in most teens over a year. However, the study can’t detect short-term harms or serious risks like cyberbullying and harmful content. Experts say banning social media for all teens may not help much, but safety issues on these platforms still need urgent attention.
Highlights
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The paper cites an internal research project Meta conducted in 2020 into the effects of deactivating Facebook. “People who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,” a report on the research found, according to court documents that are part of a lawsuit alleging that social media companies hid the risks of their products from users.
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several studies of the most crude blanket ban of all — getting smartphones out of schools — show that it improves academic performance, particularly among lower-achieving students. I expect that taking similarly harsh measures on teens’ access to social media will produce similarly positive results.
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The next time you go to Las Vegas, you’ll notice that there are no 13-year-olds in the casinos. The reason is not because a series of longitudinal studies proved to the satisfaction of the gaming industry that gambling causes anxiety and depression. Rather, there are no 13-year-olds in casinos because we know that the environment is designed to exploit them. Research like the Manchester study can offer important insights into narrow questions. But it would be a mistake to rely on it to set policy. For that you need the full picture, and the full picture of children’s experience on social media over the past decade is damning.