hypothesis on social media and mental health

Social Media and Youth Mental Health: Assessing the Impact Through Current and Novel Digital Phenotyping Methods

• Published: 29 February 2024

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• Elana Perlmutter BS 1 ,
• Bridget Dwyer BS 1 &
• John Torous MD 1  

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Purpose of Review

The effect of social media use on youth mental health is a primary public concern. Despite extensive research on the topic, social media use’s impact on adolescent mental health remains unclear with study results often contradicting each other. This narrative review examines recent literature on the relationship between social media use and youth mental health, highlights disparities in study results, and offers a novel approach for future research.

Recent Findings

Three conclusions were drawn from our review. First, contrasting usage patterns may affect mental health outcomes. Second, social media use may impact social comparison, social displacement, social stimulation, and self-determination. Lastly, limits in research methodology inhibit our understanding of the relationship between screen time and youth mental health outcomes due to the over-reliance on self-report scales, heterogeneity in scale usage, and problematic analysis methods.

The complexity of understanding the impact of social media use on youth mental health should not deter research. To advance methodology and elucidate outcomes, future studies should utilize the digital phenotyping approach. This approach uses objective data assessment from personal digital devices and allows researchers to better analyze the impact of social media use on youth mental health.

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Perlmutter, E., Dwyer, B. & Torous, J. Social Media and Youth Mental Health: Assessing the Impact Through Current and Novel Digital Phenotyping Methods. Curr Treat Options Psych (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40501-024-00312-1

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• BOOK REVIEW
• 29 March 2024

The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?

• Candice L. Odgers 0

Candice L. Odgers is the associate dean for research and a professor of psychological science and informatics at the University of California, Irvine. She also co-leads international networks on child development for both the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in Toronto and the Jacobs Foundation based in Zurich, Switzerland.

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Social-media platforms aren’t always social. Credit: Getty

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness Jonathan Haidt Allen Lane (2024)

Two things need to be said after reading The Anxious Generation . First, this book is going to sell a lot of copies, because Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story about children’s development that many parents are primed to believe. Second, the book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science. Worse, the bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people.

Haidt asserts that the great rewiring of children’s brains has taken place by “designing a firehose of addictive content that entered through kids’ eyes and ears”. And that “by displacing physical play and in-person socializing, these companies have rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale”. Such serious claims require serious evidence.

Collection: Promoting youth mental health

Haidt supplies graphs throughout the book showing that digital-technology use and adolescent mental-health problems are rising together. On the first day of the graduate statistics class I teach, I draw similar lines on a board that seem to connect two disparate phenomena, and ask the students what they think is happening. Within minutes, the students usually begin telling elaborate stories about how the two phenomena are related, even describing how one could cause the other. The plots presented throughout this book will be useful in teaching my students the fundamentals of causal inference, and how to avoid making up stories by simply looking at trend lines.

Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers 1 .

These are not just our data or my opinion. Several meta-analyses and systematic reviews converge on the same message 2 – 5 . An analysis done in 72 countries shows no consistent or measurable associations between well-being and the roll-out of social media globally 6 . Moreover, findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, the largest long-term study of adolescent brain development in the United States, has found no evidence of drastic changes associated with digital-technology use 7 . Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, is a gifted storyteller, but his tale is currently one searching for evidence.

Of course, our current understanding is incomplete, and more research is always needed. As a psychologist who has studied children’s and adolescents’ mental health for the past 20 years and tracked their well-being and digital-technology use, I appreciate the frustration and desire for simple answers. As a parent of adolescents, I would also like to identify a simple source for the sadness and pain that this generation is reporting.

A complex problem

There are, unfortunately, no simple answers. The onset and development of mental disorders, such as anxiety and depression, are driven by a complex set of genetic and environmental factors. Suicide rates among people in most age groups have been increasing steadily for the past 20 years in the United States. Researchers cite access to guns, exposure to violence, structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse, the opioid epidemic, economic hardship and social isolation as leading contributors 8 .

How social media affects teen mental health: a missing link

The current generation of adolescents was raised in the aftermath of the great recession of 2008. Haidt suggests that the resulting deprivation cannot be a factor, because unemployment has gone down. But analyses of the differential impacts of economic shocks have shown that families in the bottom 20% of the income distribution continue to experience harm 9 . In the United States, close to one in six children live below the poverty line while also growing up at the time of an opioid crisis, school shootings and increasing unrest because of racial and sexual discrimination and violence.

The good news is that more young people are talking openly about their symptoms and mental-health struggles than ever before. The bad news is that insufficient services are available to address their needs. In the United States, there is, on average, one school psychologist for every 1,119 students 10 .

Haidt’s work on emotion, culture and morality has been influential; and, in fairness, he admits that he is no specialist in clinical psychology, child development or media studies. In previous books, he has used the analogy of an elephant and its rider to argue how our gut reactions (the elephant) can drag along our rational minds (the rider). Subsequent research has shown how easy it is to pick out evidence to support our initial gut reactions to an issue. That we should question assumptions that we think are true carefully is a lesson from Haidt’s own work. Everyone used to ‘know’ that the world was flat. The falsification of previous assumptions by testing them against data can prevent us from being the rider dragged along by the elephant.

A generation in crisis

Two things can be independently true about social media. First, that there is no evidence that using these platforms is rewiring children’s brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness. Second, that considerable reforms to these platforms are required, given how much time young people spend on them. Many of Haidt’s solutions for parents, adolescents, educators and big technology firms are reasonable, including stricter content-moderation policies and requiring companies to take user age into account when designing platforms and algorithms. Others, such as age-based restrictions and bans on mobile devices, are unlikely to be effective in practice — or worse, could backfire given what we know about adolescent behaviour.

A third truth is that we have a generation in crisis and in desperate need of the best of what science and evidence-based solutions can offer. Unfortunately, our time is being spent telling stories that are unsupported by research and that do little to support young people who need, and deserve, more.

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• Published: 22 June 2023

Social media and mental health in students: a cross-sectional study during the Covid-19 pandemic

• Abouzar Nazari   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2155-5438 1 ,
• Maede Hosseinnia   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2248-7011 2 ,
• Samaneh Torkian 3 &
• Gholamreza Garmaroudi   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7449-227X 4  

BMC Psychiatry volume  23 , Article number:  458 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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Social media causes increased use and problems due to their attractions. Hence, it can affect mental health, especially in students. The present study was conducted with the aim of determining the relationship between the use of social media and the mental health of students.

Materials and methods

The current cross-sectional study was conducted in 2021 on 781 university students in Lorestan province, who were selected by the Convenience Sampling method. The data was collected using a questionnaire on demographic characteristics, social media, problematic use of social media, and mental health (DASS-21). Data were analyzed in SPSS-26 software.

Shows that marital status, major, and household income are significantly associated with lower DASS21 scores (a lower DASS21 score means better mental health status). Also, problematic use of social media (β = 3.54, 95% CI: (3.23, 3.85)) was significantly associated with higher mental health scores (a higher DASS21 score means worse mental health status). Income and social media use (β = 1.02, 95% CI: 0.78, 1.25) were significantly associated with higher DASS21 scores (a higher DASS21 score means worse mental health status). Major was significantly associated with lower DASS21 scores (a lower DASS21 score means better mental health status).

This study indicated that social media had a direct relationship with mental health. Despite the large amount of evidence suggesting that social media harms mental health, more research is still necessary to determine the cause and how social media can be used without harmful effects.

Peer Review reports

• Social media

Social media is one of the newest and most popular internet services, which has caused significant progress in the social systems of different countries in recent years [ 1 , 2 ]. The use of the Internet has become popular among people in such a way that its use has become inevitable and has made life difficult for those who use it excessively [ 3 ]. Social media has attracted the attention of millions of users around the world owing to the possibility of fast communication, access to a large amount of information, and its widespread dissemination [ 4 ]. Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Twitter are the most popular media that have attractive and diverse spaces for online communication among users, especially the young generation [ 5 , 6 ].

According to studies, at least 55% of the world’s population used social media in 2022 [ 7 ]. Iranian statistics also indicate that 78.5% of people use at least one social media. WhatsApp, with 71.1% of users, Instagram, with 49.4%, and Telegram, with 31.6% are the most popular social media among Iranians [ 8 , 9 ].

The use of social media has increased significantly in all age groups due to the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic [ 10 ] .It affected younger people, especially students, due to educational and other purposes [ 11 , 12 ]. Because of the sudden onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, educational institutions and learners had to accept e-learning as the only sustainable education option [ 13 ]. The rapid migration to E-learning has brought several challenges that can have both positive and negative consequences [ 14 ].

Unlike traditional media, where users are passive, social media enables people to create and share content; hence, they have become popular tools for social interaction [ 15 ].The freedom to choose to participate in the company of friends, anonymity, moderation, encouragement, the free exchange of feelings, and network interactions without physical presence and the constraints of the real world are some of the most significant factors that influence users’ continued activity in social media [ 16 ]. In social media, people can interact, maintain relationships, make new friends, and find out more about the people they know offline [ 17 ]. However, this popularity has resulted in significant lifestyle changes, as well as intentional or unintentional changes in various aspects of human social life [ 18 ]. Despite many advantages, the high use of social media brings negative physical, psychological, and social problems and consequences [ 19 ], but despite the use and access of more people to the Internet, its consequences and crises have been ignored [ 20 ].

Use of social media and mental health

Spending too much time on social media can easily become problematic [ 21 ]. Excessive use of social media, called problematic use, has symptoms similar to addiction [ 22 , 23 ]. Problematic use of social media represents a non-drug-related disorder in which harmful effects emerge due to preoccupation and compulsion to over-participate in social media platforms despite its highly negative consequences [ 24 , 25 , 26 ], which leads to adverse consequences of mental health, including anxiety, depression, lower well-being, and lower self-esteem [ 27 , 28 , 29 ].

Mental health & use of social media

Mental health is the main pillar of healthy human societies, which plays a vital role in ensuring the dynamism and efficiency of any society in such a way that other parts of health cannot be achieved without mental health [ 30 ]. According to World Health Organization’s (WHO) definition, mental health refers to a person’s ability to communicate with others [ 31 ]. Some researchers believe that social relationships can significantly affect mental health and improve quality of life by creating a sense of belonging and social identity [ 32 ]. It is also reported that people with higher social interactions have higher physical and mental health [ 33 ].

Scientific evidence also shows that social media affect people’s mental health [ 34 ]. Social studies and critiques often emphasize the investigation of the negative effects of Internet use [ 35 ]. For example, Kim et al. studied 1573 participants aged 18–64 years and reported that Internet addiction and social media use were associated with higher levels of depression and suicidal thoughts [ 36 ]. Zadar also studied adults and reported that excessive use of social media and the Internet was correlated with stress, sleep disturbances, and personality disorders [ 37 ]. Richards et al. reported the negative effects of the Internet and social media on the health and quality of life of adolescents [ 38 ]. There have been numerous studies that examine Internet addiction and its associated problems in young people [ 39 , 40 ], as well as reports of the effects of social media use on young people’s mental health [ 41 , 42 ].

A study on Iranian students showed that social media leads to depression, anxiety, and mental health decline [ 25 ]. A study on Iranian students showed that social media leads to depression, anxiety, and mental health decline [ 25 ]. But no study has investigated the effects of social media on the mental health of students from a more traditional province with lower individualism and higher levels of social support (where they were thought to have lower social media use and better mental health) during the COVID-19 pandemic. As social media became more and more vital to university students’ social lives during the lockdowns, students were likely at increased risk of social media addiction, which could harm their mental health. University students depended more on social media due to the limitations of face-to-face interactions. In addition, previous studies were conducted exclusively on students in specific fields. However, in our study, all fields, including medical and non-medical science fields were investigated.

The present study was conducted to determine the relationship between the use of social media and mental health in students in Lorestan Province during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Study design and participants

The current study was descriptive-analytical, cross-sectional, and conducted from February to March 2022 with a statistical population made up of students in all academic grades at universities in Lorestan Province (19 scientific and academic centers, including centers under the supervision of the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Science).

Sample size

According to the convenience sampling method, 781 people were chosen as participants in the present study. During the sampling, a questionnaire was created and uploaded virtually on Porsline’s website, and then the questionnaire link was shared in educational and academic groups on social media for students to complete the questionnaire under inclusion criteria (being a student at the University of Lorestan and consenting to participate in the study).

The research tools included the demographic information questionnaire, the standard social media use questionnaire, and the mental health questionnaire.

Demographic information

The demographic information age, gender, ethnicity, province of residence, urban or rural, place of residence, semester, and the field of study, marital status, household income, education level, and employment status were recorded.

Psychological assessment

The students were subjected to the Persian version of the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS21). It consists of three self-report scales designed to measure different emotional states. DASS21 questions were adjusted according to their importance and the culture of Iranian students. The DASS21 scale was scored on a four-point scale to assess the extent to which participants experienced each condition over the past few weeks. The scoring method was such that each question was scored from 0 (never) to 3 (very high). Samani (2008) found that the questionnaire has a validity of 0.77 and a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.82 [ 43 ].

Use of social media questionnaire

Among the 13 questions on social media use in the questionnaire, seven were asked on a Likert scale (never, sometimes, often, almost, and always) that examined the problematic use of social media, and six were asked about how much time users spend on social media. Because some items were related to the type of social media platform, which is not available today, and users now use newer social media platforms such as WhatsApp and Instagram, the questionnaires were modified by experts and fundamentally changed, and a 22-item questionnaire was obtained that covered the frequency of using social media. Cronbach’s alpha was equal to 0.705 for the first part, 0.794 for the second part, and 0.830 for all questions [ 44 ]. Considering the importance of the problematic use of the social media, six questions about the problematic use were measured separately.

To confirm the validity of the questionnaire, a panel of experts with CVR 0.49 and CVI 0.70 was used. Its reliability was also obtained (0.784) using Cronbach’s alpha coefficient. Finally, the questionnaire was tested in a class with 30 students to check the level of difficulty and comprehension of the questionnaire. Finally, a 22-item questionnaire was obtained, of which six items were about the problematic use of social media and the remaining 16 questions were about the rate and frequency of using social media. Cronbach’s alpha was 0.705 for the first part, including questions about the problematic use of the social media, and 0.794 for the second part, including questions about the rate and frequency of using the social media. The total Cronbach’s alpha for all questions was 0.830. Six questions about the problematic use of social media were measured separately due to the importance of the problematic use of social media. Also, a separate score was considered for each question. The scores of these six questions on the problematic use of the social media were summed, and a single score was obtained for analysis.

Statistical analysis

Data were analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 26.0 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA). The normal distribution of continuous variables was analyzed using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, histogram, and P-P diagram, which showed that they are not normally distributed. Descriptive statistics were calculated for all variables. Comparison between groups was done using Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis non-parametric tests. Multiple linear regression analysis was used to investigate the relationship between mental health, problematic use of social media, and social media use (The result of merging the Frequency of using social media and Time to use social media). Generalized Linear Models (GLM) were used to assess the association between mental health with the use of social media and problematic use of social media. Due to the high correlation (r = 0.585, p = < 0.001) between the use of social media and problematic use of social media, collinearity, we run two separate GLM models. Regression coefficients (β) and adjusted β (β*) with 95% CI and P-value were reported.

A total of 781 participants completed the questionnaires, of which 64.4% were women and 71.3% were single. The minimum age of the participants was 17 years, the maximum age was 45 years, and about half of them (48.9%) were between 21 and 25 years old. A total of 53.4% of the participants had bachelor’s degrees. The income level of 23.2% of participants was less than five million Tomans (the currency of Iran), and 69.7% of the participants were unemployed. 88.1% were living with their families and 70.8% were studying in non-medical fields. 86% of the participants lived in the city, and 58.9% were in their fourth semester or higher. Considering that the research was conducted in a Lorish Province, 43.8% of participants were from the Lorish ethnicity.

The mean total score of mental health was 12.30 with a standard deviation of 30.38, and the mean total score of social media was 14.5557 with a standard deviation of 7.74140.

Table  1 presents a comparison of the mean problematic use of social media and mental health with demographic variables. Considering the non-normality of the hypothesis H0, to compare the means of the independent variables, Mann-Whitney non-parametric tests (for the variables of gender, the field of study, academic semester, employment status, province of residence, and whether it is rural or urban) and Kruskal Wallis (for the variables age, ethnicity, level of education, household income and marital status). According to the obtained results, it was found that the score of problematic use of social media is significantly higher in women, the age group less than 20 years, unemployed, non-native students, dormitory students, and students living with friends or alone, Fars students, students with a household income level of fewer than 7 million Tomans(Iranian currency), and single, divorced, and widowed students were higher than the other groups(P < 0.05).

By comparing the mean score of mental health with demographic variables using non-parametric Mann-Whitney and Kruskal Wallis tests, it was found that there is a significant difference between the variable of poor mental health and all demographic variables (except for the semester variable), residence status (rural or urban) and education level. (There was a significant relationship (P < 0.05). In such a way that the mental health condition was worse in women, age group less than 20 years old, non-medical science, unemployed, non-native, and dormitory students. Also, Fars students, divorced, widowed, and students with a household income of fewer than 5 million Tomans (Iranian currency) showed poorer mental health status. (Table  1 ).

The final model shows that marital status, field, and household income were significantly associated with lower DASS21 scores (a lower DASS21 score means better mental health status). Being single (β* = -23.03, 95% CI: (-33.10, -12.96), being married (β* = -38.78, 95% CI: -51.23, -26.33), was in Medical sciences fields (β* = -8.15, 95% CI: -11.37, -4.94), and have income 7–10 million (β* = -5.66, 95% CI: -9.62, -1.71) were significantly associated with lower DASS21 scores (a lower DASS21 score means better mental health status). Problematic use of social media (β* = 3.54, 95% CI: (3.23, 3.85) was significantly associated with higher mental health scores (a higher DASS21 score means worse mental health status). (Table  2 )

Age, income, and use of social media (β* = 1.02, 95% CI: 0.78, 1.25) were significantly associated with higher DASS21 scores (a higher DASS21 score means worse mental health status). Marital status and field were significantly associated with lower DASS21 scores (a lower DASS21 score means better mental health status). Age groups < 20 years (β* = 6.36, 95% CI: 0.78, 11.95) and income group < 5 million (β* = 6.58, 95% CI: 1.47, 11.70) increased mental health scores. Being single (β* = -34.72, 95% CI: -47.06, -38.78), being married (β* = -38.78, 95% CI: -51.23, -26.33) and in medical sciences fields (β* = -8.17, 95% CI: -12.09, -4.24) decreased DASS21 scores. (Table  3 )

The main purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between social media use and mental health among students during the COVID-19 pandemic.

University students are more reliant on social media because of the limitations of in-person interactions [ 45 ]. Since social media has become more and more vital to the social lives of university students during the pandemic, students may be at increased risk of social media addiction, which may be harmful to their mental health [ 14 ].

During non-adulthood, peer relations and approval are critical and social media seems to meet these needs. For example, connection and communication with friends make them feel better and happier, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic and national lockdowns where face-to-face communication was restricted [ 46 ]. Kele’s study showed that the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the time spent on social media, and the frequency of online activities [ 47 ].

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, e-learning became the only sustainable option for students [ 13 ]. This abrupt transition can lead to depression, stress, or anxiety for some students due to insufficient time to adjust to the new learning environment. The role of social media is also important to some university students [ 48 ].

Staying at home, having nothing else to do, and being unable to go out and meet with friends due to the lockdown measures increased the time spent on social media and the frequency of online activities, which influenced their mental health negatively [ 49 ]. These reasons may explain the findings of previous studies that found an increase in depression and anxiety among adolescents who were healthy before the COVID-19 pandemic [ 50 ].

According to the results, there was a statistically significant relationship between social media use and mental health in students, in such a way that one Unit increase in the score of social media use enhanced the score of mental health. These two variables were directly correlated. Consistent with the current study, many studies have shown a significant relationship between higher use of social media and lower mental health in students [ 45 , 51 , 52 , 53 , 54 ].

Inconsistent with the findings of the present study, some previous studies reported the positive effect of social media use on mental health [ 55 , 56 , 57 ]. The differences in findings could be attributed to the time and location of the studies. Anderson’s study in France in 2018 found no significant relationship between social media use and mental health. This may be because of the differences between the tools for measuring the ability to detect fake news and health literacy and the scales of the research [ 4 ].

The present study showed that the impact of using social media on the mental health of students was higher than Lebni’s study, which was conducted in 2020 [ 25 ]. Also, in Dost Mohammad’s study in 2018, the effect of using social media on the mental health of students was reported to be lower than in the present study [ 58 ]. Entezari’s study in 2021, was also lower than the present study [ 59 ]. It seems that the excessive use of social media during the COVID-19 pandemic was the reason for the greater effects of social media on students’ mental health.

The use of social media has positive and negative characteristics. Social media is most useful for rapidly disseminating timely information via widely accessible platforms [ 4 ]. Among the types of studies, at least one shows an inverse relationship between the use of social media and mental health [ 53 ]. While social media can serve as a tool for fostering connection during periods of physical isolation, the mental health implications of social media being used as a news source are tenuous [ 45 ].

The results of the GLM analysis indicated that there was a statistically significant relationship between the problematic use of social media and mental health in students in such a way that one-unit increase in the score of problematic use of social media enhanced the mental health score, and it was found that the two variables had a direct relationship. Consistent with our study, Boer’s study showed that problematic use of social media may highlight the potential risk to adolescent mental health [ 60 ]. Malaeb also reported that the problematic use of social media had a positive relationship with mental health [ 61 ], but that study was conducted on adults and had a smaller sample size before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Saputri’s study found that excessive social media use likely harms the mental health of university students since students with higher social media addiction scores had a greater risk of experiencing mild depression [ 62 ]. A systematic literature review before the COVID-19 pandemic (2019) found that the time spent by adolescents on social media was associated with depression, anxiety, and psychological distress [ 63 ]. Marino’s study (2018) reported a significant correlation between the problematic use of social media by students and psychological distress [ 64 ].

Social media has become more vital for students’ social lives owing to online education during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, this group is more at risk of addiction to social media and may experience more mental health problems than other groups. Lebni also indicated that students’ higher use of the Internet led to anxiety, depression, and adverse mental health, but the main purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of such factors on student’s academic performance [ 25 ]. Previous studies indicated that individuals who spent more time on social media had lower self-esteem and higher levels of anxiety and depression [ 65 , 66 ]. In the present study, students with higher social media addiction scores were at higher mental health risk. Such a finding was consistent with research by Gao et al., who found that the excessive use of social media during the pandemic had adverse effects on social health [ 14 ]. Cheng et al. indicated that using the Internet, especially for communication with people, can harm mental health by changing the quality of social relationships, face-to-face communication, and changes in social support [ 24 ].

A reason for the significant relationship between social media use and mental health in students during the COVID-19 pandemic in the present study was probably the students’ intentional or unintentional use of online communication. Unfortunately, social media published information, which might be incorrect, in this pandemic that caused public fear and threatened mental health.

During the pandemic, social media played essential roles in learning and leisure activities. Due to electronic education, staying at home, and long leisure time, students had more time, frequency, and opportunities to use social media in this pandemic. Such a high reliance on social media may threaten student’s mental health. Lee et al. conducted a study during the COVID-19 pandemic and confirmed that young people who used social media had higher symptoms of depression and loneliness than before the COVID-19 pandemic [ 67 ].

The present study showed that there was a significant positive relationship between problematic use of social media and gender, so that women were more willing to use social media, probably because they had more opportunities to use social media as they stayed at home more than men; hence, they were more exposed to problematic use of social media. Consistent with our study, Andreassen reported that being a woman was an important factor in social media addiction [ 68 ]. In contrast to our study, Azizi’s study in Iran showed that male students use social media significantly more than female students, possibly due to differences in demographic variables in each population [ 69 ].

Moreover, there was a significant relationship between age and problematic use of social media in that people younger than 20 were more willing to use social media in a problematic way. Consistent with the present study, Perrin also indicated that younger people further used social media [ 70 ].

According to the findings, unemployed students used social media more than employed ones, probably because they had more time to spend in virtual space, leading to higher use and the possibility of problematic use of social media [ 71 ].

Moreover, non-native students were more willing to use the social media probably because students who lived far away from their families used social media problematically due to the lack of family control over hours of use and higher opportunities [ 72 ] .

The results showed that rural students have a greater tendency to use social Medias than urban students. Inconsistent with this finding, Perrin reported that urban people were more willing to use the social media. The difference was probably due to different research times and places or different target groups [ 70 ].

According to the current study, people with low household income were more likely to use social media, most likely because low-income people seek free information and services due to a lack of access to facilities and equipment in the real world or because they seek assimilation with people around them. Inconsistent with our findings, Hruska et al. reported that people with high household income levels made much use of social media [ 73 ], probably because of cultural, economic, and social differences or different information measurement tools.

Furthermore, single, divorced, and widowed students used social media more than married students. This is because they spend more time on social media due to the need for more emotional attention, the search for a life partner, or a feeling of loneliness. This also led to the problematic use of social media [ 74 ].

According to the results, Fars people used social media more than other ethnic groups, but this difference was insignificant. This finding was consistent with Perrin’s study, but the population consisted of people aged 18 to 65 [ 70 ].

In the current study, there was a significant relationship between gender and mental health, so that women had lower mental health than men. The difference was in health sociology. Consistent with the present study, Ghasemi et al. indicated that it appeared necessary to pay more attention to women’s health and create an opportunity for them to use health services [ 75 ].

The findings revealed that unemployed students had lower mental health than employed students, most likely because unemployed individuals have lower mental health due to not having a job and being economically dependent on others, as well as feeling incompetent at times. Consistent with the present study, Bialowolski reported that unemployment and low income caused mental disorders and threatened mental health [ 76 ].

According to this study, non-native students have lower mental health than native students because they live far from their families. The family plays an imperative role in improving the mental health of their children, and mental health requires their support. Also, the economic, social, and support problems caused by being away from the family have endangered their mental health [ 77 ].

Another important factor of the current study was that married people had higher mental health than single people. In addition, divorced and widowed students had lower mental health [ 78 ]. Possibly due to the social pressure they suffer in Iranian society. Furthermore, they received lower emotional support than married people. Therefore, their lower mental health seemed logical [ 79 , 80 , 81 ]. A large study in a European population also reported differences in the likelihood of mood, anxiety, and personality disorders between separated/divorced and married mothers [ 82 ].

A key point confirmed in other studies is the relationship between low incomes with mental health. A meta-analysis by Lorant indicated that economic and social inequalities caused mental disorders [ 83 ]. Safran also reported that the probability of developing mental disorders in people with low socioeconomic status is up to three times higher than that of people with the highest socioeconomic status [ 84 ]. Bialowolski’s study was consistent with the current study but Bialowolski’s study examined employees [ 76 ].

The present study was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic and therefore had limitations in accessing students. Another limitation was the use of self-reporting tools. Participants may show positive self-presentation by over- or under-reporting their social media-related behaviors and some mental health-related items, which may directly or indirectly lead to social desirability bias, information bias, and reporting bias. Small sample sizes and convenience sampling limit student population representativeness and generalizability. This study was based on cross-sectional data. Therefore, the estimation results should be seen as associative rather than causative. Future studies would need to investigate causal effects using a longitudinal or cohort design, or another causal effect research design.

The findings of this study indicated that the high use of social media affected students’ mental health. Furthermore, the problematic use of the social media had a direct relationship with mental health. Variables such as age, gender, income level, marital status, and unemployment of non-native students had significant relationships with social media use and mental health. Despite the large amount of evidence suggesting that social media harms mental health, more research is still necessary to determine the cause and how social media can be used without harmful effects. It is imperative to better understand the relationship between social media use and mental health symptoms among young people to prevent such a negative outcome.

Data Availability

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their gratitude to all academic officials of Lorestan universities and Mr. Mohsen Amani for their cooperation in data collection.

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Abouzar Nazari

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Maede Hosseinnia

Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Faculty of Health, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, 1417613151, Iran

Samaneh Torkian

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Abouzar Nazari and Maedeh Hossennia designed the study, collected the data and drafted the manuscript. Samaneh Torkian performed the statistical analysis and prepared the tables. Gholamreza Garmaroudi, as the responsible author, supervised the entire study. All authors reviewed and edited the draft manuscript and approved the final version.

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Nazari, A., Hosseinnia, M., Torkian, S. et al. Social media and mental health in students: a cross-sectional study during the Covid-19 pandemic. BMC Psychiatry 23 , 458 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-023-04859-w

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The Relationship between Social Media and the Increase in Mental Health Problems

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The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author.

Social media has become an indispensable aspect of young people’s digital interactions, as they use it mostly for entertainment and communication purposes. Consequently, it has the potential to have both positive and negative effects on them. Deterioration in mental health is one of the side effects stemming from social media overuse. This study investigates the relationship between social media and the increase in mental health problems in Saudi Arabia. The population considered for analysis includes young people from Saudi Arabia, with a sample size of 385. A closed-ended survey questionnaire was used to collect data on different social media features and criteria. Using the Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP), the researcher analyzed data to compare the effect of different social media features on mental health. The social media features included in this paper are private chats and calls, group chats and calls, browsing posts, games, media sharing, adverts, likes/comments/followers, and pages. The researcher adopted entertainment, information, social interaction, privacy, esteem, and communication as the criteria in the AHP process. Among these criteria, the study found that entertainment was the most significant, while privacy was the least significant. Findings suggested that likes, comments, and followers were the biggest contributors to poor mental health (total utility = 56.24). The least effective feature was ‘games’ (total utility = 2.56). The researcher recommends that social media users be cautious when interacting with social media features, especially likes, comments, followers, media, and posts, because of their significant effect on mental health.

1. Introduction

Mental health is a crucial aspect of human wellbeing, yet it is often overlooked and stigmatized. According to the World Health Organization, the prevalence of mental health problems is increasing at a rate of 13% per year [ 1 ]. Anxiety and depression are the most common mental health issues, affecting 264 million and 280 million people worldwide, respectively [ 2 , 3 ]. In addition, an estimated 269 million people were struggling with drug and substance abuse by the end of 2018 [ 4 ]. These numbers are likely to continue to rise due to a variety of factors. One factor that has been identified as contributing to the increase in mental health challenges is the use of technologies, including social media. Social media refers to applications that allow users to interact with each other through the creation and exchange of media, text, and calls within a network [ 5 ]. Some examples of social media platforms include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. Key social media features considered in this investigation are private chats, group chats, browsing posts, adverts, media sharing, calls, likes and comments, and pages. Social media has been linked to poor sleep patterns, depression, and anxiety [ 6 ]. In addition, ref. [ 7 ] warns of the negative impact that excessive social media use can have on the mental health of young people.

Saudi Arabia has a high level of social media usage, with 82.3% of the population (29.5 million people) using social media in 2022 [ 8 ]. Young people, who make up 36.74% of the population, are the biggest users of social media in Saudi Arabia, with 98.43% of young people using social networking sites [ 9 ]. The top three reasons given by Saudis for using social media are keeping in touch with friends and family, use of free time, and finding products to purchase [ 8 ]. The prevalence of mental health issues in the KSA is estimated to be around 20.2% [ 10 ]. Depression is the most common mental health condition, affecting 21% of the population, followed by anxiety (17.5%) and stress (12.6%) [ 11 ]. Research has shown that social media use in Saudi Arabia is correlated with increased mental health issues [ 12 ]. High social media exposure has also been found to be associated with a higher risk of depression and anxiety in the kingdom [ 12 ]. Studies have also shown a significant correlation between the use of social networking sites and the increase in depression-related conditions in Saudi Arabia [ 13 ].

The aim of this study is to examine the impact of social media on mental health in Saudi Arabia and to identify which social media features have the greatest impact on increasing mental health issues. The study uses an Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) to analyze several social media features and determine their impacts on mental health. By understanding the specific features that contribute to mental health problems, individuals and policymakers can take steps to alleviate mental health issues and reduce the negative effects of social media. The results of this study will provide valuable insights into the impact of social media on mental health in Saudi Arabia and can inform the development of strategies to mitigate these effects.

2. Literature Review

One of the primary features of social media is chatting. As a social network, chats are a powerful method of communication among social media users. They may take the form of group or private chats. According to [ 14 ], young people with psychological issues tend to worsen their conditions by participating in social media chatrooms. Private chats are not exempted, as ref. [ 15 ] found that constant chatting with other people without feeling their physical presence is one reason for the increase in mental health issues among social media users. The outcome is more loneliness, a common factor in psychological deterioration. While chatting may not directly cause depression and other mental health problems, it can exacerbate an individual’s symptoms if one engages in long chats [ 16 ]. The studies further caution that young people must be careful when chatting with their peers on social media.

Browsing posts and advertisements are equally part of social media. Social media posts often portray falsehoods by allowing one to elevate their good qualities and suppress their negative ones [ 17 ]. Young people may not understand this fact, and they are likely to think that something is wrong with themselves because they do not look as good as the posts made by their friends. The authors of [ 18 ] found that social media influencers significantly contribute to the poor mental health of social media users. Advertisements power most social networking platforms, and users have had to embrace the presence of ads alongside their digital social lives. Because of their wide viewership, ads shape the psychology and opinions of young people on these platforms [ 19 ]. An advertisement portraying a muscular individual may depress a social media user who does not have similar body features. Similarly, ads with tall girls may negatively impact young girls psychologically because of social projection.

Sharing media, playing games on digital social networks, and interacting on video conferencing channels may negatively impact an individual’s mental health. In some cases, ref. [ 14 ] found that the sharing of media and interactions on social media prompts users to think less of themselves. Some users may not have good enough videos because their equipment, such as cameras, is not as good as their friends’ devices. Moreover, watching videos on social media can be an addictive habit if left unchecked. The authors of [ 20 ] argue that the active watching of and commenting on YouTube videos makes the platform overly addictive compared to people who passively watch videos without associated interactions. The authors advise that people’s interactions on video-based social media platforms should be minimal. Regarding games, ref. [ 21 ] argues that high involvement in social media games can result in addiction. Such a condition may make an individual overly dependent on these games, which distorts their mental health.

An individual’s following and the intensity with which people react to their posts can impact their mental health. For example, ref. [ 22 ] reports that users who update more frequently on their social media pages tend to receive more feedback in the form of likes and comments. This feedback is important, as it enhances the self-esteem of post authors. Moreover, ref. [ 23 ] observes that people receiving negative feedback from their social media posts are more susceptible to emotional distress. The study affirms that technologies aiding young people in comparing social statuses present a risk to their mental wellbeing. Some turn to social media to increase followers and gain a sense of gratification to compensate for their emotional and psychological challenges [ 24 ]. This leads them further down the path of a graver depression.

3. Methodology

This section provides an explanation of the methodological processes that the researcher used in order to acquire data and analyze them. The research design of this study is described in Section 3.1 , which is then followed by the population, the sampling method, and the survey instrument. The phases of the Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) used in the research are explained in the following subsections.

3.1. Research Design

The specific approach taken by the researcher is the Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP). It is a decision-making model that uses paired comparisons to determine the most significant factors that affect a decision [ 25 ]. In this case, the researcher wished to identify and rank social media factors impacting mental health. This ranking will help in prioritizing which aspects of social media use to manage at a personal level. The elements of social media in this study are private chats, group chats, browsing posts, adverts, media sharing, calls, likes and comments, and pages. The study undertakes a survey that asks respondents to indicate how useful these social media features are to them and how each element may lead to mental health problems.

3.2. Population, Sampling, and Survey Instrument

This study considered Saudi Arabia as the unit of study, while the study population was Saudi youth aged between 18 and 35. The United Nations defines youth as persons between 18 and 24. However, the researcher sought a more accommodating criterion regarding respondent ages. The selection of young people as the target population was motivated by the fact that 98.43% of them are on social media [ 9 ]. In addition, ref. [ 9 ] also reports that 7,623,336 young people belong to this demographic. The computed sample size from this population is 385 using Yamane’s formula [ 26 ]. Gender-wise, the researcher allowed respondents to indicate whether they were male, female, or non-binary. All respondents selected either the male or female category. Hence, the researcher analyzed the results in this fashion. The sample for this study was selected using simple random sampling on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. This sampling method involves selecting participants randomly from the target population, which in this case were young people in Saudi Arabia who use social media. This helped to ensure that the sample was representative of the target population and that the responses were accurate and reliable. To ensure the content validity of the questionnaire, a pre-test of the survey was performed, since it is in the researcher’s best interest to have expert evaluations and reviews of the comprehensibility and clarity of the used research instrument. Several questions were altered, reworded, or eliminated in response to positive comments and ideas for small modifications. The amended questionnaire was forwarded to the collaborating academics for review and evaluation to confirm the instrument’s face validity. This questionnaire’s question types were determined by their degree of relevance to each identified concept. The Content Validity Index (CVI) was calculated to be 1, indicating that all three questions were relevant and appropriate for the study. This suggests that the questionnaire was valid and that it measured the variables of interest in a reliable and accurate manner.

The researcher used social media platforms to reach a diverse and representative sample of young people in the country. The social media platforms used in communication with participants (personal and business) included Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat. The researcher sent out a post including all the details about the research, and a link was included to direct the participants to the questionnaire page. The questionnaire was hosted on Google Forms to facilitate distribution, and it was left open for one month to allow respondents to respond at their convenience. The final questionnaire had a two-part structure, including demographic questions and three main questions with selective options for participants. Appendix A shows the list of questions asked to the respondents.

3.3. Analytical Hierarchical Process

The Analytical Hierarchical Process involves four primary steps, which are

• Identifying decisions, options, and criteria;
• Conducting pairwise comparisons;
• Computing weights for the criteria;
• Calculating utility values.

3.3.1. Identifying Decisions, Options, and Criteria

The decision is determining which social media features have the biggest effect on increasing mental health problems. The options were the eight social media features, namely private chats, group chats, browsing posts, adverts, media sharing, calls, likes and comments, and pages. The criteria for determining which features are the most influential were the importance of a feature to an individual, the time spent interacting with the feature, and the recency of interaction.

3.3.2. Pairwise Comparison

Pairwise comparisons involve comparing two criteria simultaneously to build a square n × n matrix, where n is the number of criteria. The comparison is structured in such a way that the value entered in a cell represents the number of times one criterion is more important relative to the other. Because the two criteria being compared are the same, the relative value of each criterion is equal to one when they are compared to each other [ 25 ]. The maximum possible score is n, and larger numbers indicate that a criterion is becoming essential. The pairwise comparison will compare time spent on a feature, recency in using the feature, and the overall importance of the feature to the respondents.

3.3.3. Importance Weights

After populating the matrix, it is used to compute the importance weights. They signal to an analyst the extent to which each criterion will affect their ultimate decision. The researcher gave the biggest weight to the item with the most significant importance. The study computed the geometric mean of the criteria to ensure objectivity in the computation in the first step, as suggested by [ 27 ]. In the second step, the relative composition of the criterion values was determined, which was used to determine their weights [ 28 ]. In order to complete the procedure, the computation of the ratio of the value of each criterion to the overall value is needed.

3.3.4. Calculating Utility Values

Computing the utility is the final step in the analytical hierarchal process. It involves establishing the ‘utiles’ associated and multiplying them by their corresponding importance scores [ 27 ]. The ‘utiles’ are obtained using respondents’ subjective evaluation of how each feature instigates mental health challenges. ‘Utility’ is a quantitative value that indicates how useful something is to an individual. This figure helps in selecting the most significant option. It is possible to represent utility as a percentage. It is argued that a criterion’s usefulness increases as its advantages or benefits increase. Depending on the criterion, it is conceivable that utility will be computed differently. The importance of the criteria selected for investigation and the utility attached to the criterion were multiplied to show the utility calculation for each criterion. The values for each criterion were added to determine the total utility of each social media feature.

4.1. Analysis of Demographic Characteristics

This section analyzes the age, gender, and occupations of the study participants. The findings reveal that the most populous age group was that of members aged between 18 and 25, as they constituted 60.3% (232) of the study population. Male respondents accounted for 55.3% (213) of the sampled participants. The most dominant group by occupation was students, as they accounted for 41.8% (161) of the sampled participants. Table 1 provides further details about the demographic characteristics of the respondents.

Respondents’ demographic characteristics.

4.2. Favorite Features of Respondents

The researcher first examined which of the selected social media features were favored by the respondents. The findings suggested that likes, comments, and followers were the most relevant aspects of social media that the respondents liked, obtaining a mean score of 7.29/8.00. The least favorite feature was gaming, scoring a mean of 2.05/8.00. Table 2 shows the performance of the different features.

Ranking the relevance of social media features to respondents.

4.3. Pairwise Comparison

The researcher established the criteria comparison matrix using the responses to questions that asked participants to rank the factors influencing their sentiments on social media features. The ranking was based on the mean score obtained from the 385 responses regarding their criteria ranking. In this case, the highest ranked criteria by the respondents scored higher values in Table 3 . Evidence suggests that people decided which social media feature they valued mostly based on its entertainment value (value = 6) and less so based on the feature’s privacy (value = 1).

Criteria importance.

The computation of matrix values in Table 4 was based on the values established in Table 3 above. The basis of the values is the mean ranks of the criteria, as expressed by the respondents. In this case, the matrix values indicated the number of times one criterion was more important than the corresponding criterion [ 28 ]. For example, the highlighted pair in Table 4 shows that esteem was two times more important that the corresponding information criterion.

Pairwise comparison matrix.

4.4. Importance Weights

The first step involves the computation of the criteria’s geometric mean [ 28 ] to determine their influence on the final decision. In this case, it is the sixth root of the product of the row elements in Table 4 . Below is the basic formula used in computing the weights of the criteria, assuming n criteria:

• V i : Geometric mean for criterion i ;
• X i 1 : Pairwise importance of criterion i relative to criterion 1;
• X i 2 : Pairwise importance of criterion i relative to criterion 2;
• X in : Pairwise importance of criterion i relative to criterion n ;
• n : Number of criteria.

The second step involves finding the proportionate composition of the criteria values, which will count as their weights [ 28 ]. The procedure requires the computation of the ratio of each criterion’s value against the total value:

• W i : Weights for criterion i .

4.5. Computing Utility Values

The researcher computed the feature utiles by first ranking their respective mean responses. The findings in Table 5 show that respondents thought that likes, comments, and followers on social media would often cause people’s mental health problems. Other similarly high-risk features are browsing posts and adverts.

Utility values.

4.6. Comparing Social Media’s Effects on Mental Health

This study computed the total utility as the product of the utiles (feature strengths), importance weights (criteria weights), and how favored the features were by the respondents (relevance). In Table 6 , each feature’s strength is multiplied by the criteria weights to obtain the cell values. The row values are then added and multiplied by a feature’s importance to determine the total utility. The total utility is obtained using the following formula:

• TU i : Total Utility for criterion i ;
• W i : Weights for criterion i ;
• UV j = Utility Value for feature j ;
• MR i : Mean Relevance for criterion i ;
• i from 1 to 8, j from 1 to 6.

Estimating the effect of social media features on mental health problems.

The findings suggest that the feature with the most significant negative effect on mental health is ‘likes, comments, and followers.’ This feature scored a total utility of 56.24. On the other hand, the feature with the least significant negative effect on mental health is ‘social media games’. This study found the feature to have a total utility of 2.56. While the respondents had opined in Table 3 that adverts substantially contribute to mental instability, the criteria weights for this feature were too low to significantly impact the feature’s total utility.

5. Discussion

In this study, the researcher found that social media has a significant negative impact on the mental health of Saudi Arabian youth. The feature that had the greatest impact was likes, comments, and followers, with a utility value of 56.24. This suggests that individuals who are seeking validation and social esteem through social media may be more prone to experiencing stress, depression, and anxiety. Browsing posts and media sharing were also identified as significant features that negatively impact mental health, with utility values of 45.03 and 25.40, respectively. These findings align with previous research that has identified the presence of influencers on social media as a potential source of stress and depression for regular users who may feel pressure to emulate these individuals [ 18 ]. Additionally, excessive exposure to social media videos has been linked to negative mental health outcomes [ 20 ].

On the other hand, this study found that social media games had the least impact on mental health, with a utility value of only 2.05. This finding differs from previous research that has identified games on social media as highly addictive and potentially harmful to mental health [ 21 ]. However, it is important to note that this study only compared the negative impact of different social media features on mental health, and it is possible that social media games may have a greater impact when studied in isolation. These findings highlight the need for caution in the use of social media, particularly among young people in Saudi Arabia. While social media can provide a sense of connection and support, it is important to be aware of its potential negative impacts on mental health. In light of these findings, it may be beneficial for individuals to set limits on their social media use and prioritize activities that promote mental wellbeing, such as physical exercise and social interaction with friends and family.

One potential implication of these findings is the need for greater education and awareness about the potential dangers of social media. This could involve educating people about the importance of finding validation from sources other than social media, as well as helping people to develop healthy habits when it comes to their social media use. This could involve setting limits on the amount of time spent on social media, being selective about the content that is consumed, and finding ways to disconnect from social media when necessary. Overall, these findings highlight the need for caution when using social media, particularly for youth in Saudi Arabia. While social media can be a useful tool for communication and connection, it is important to be mindful of the potential negative effects on mental health. It may be helpful for individuals to limit the attention they pay to certain features, such as likes, comments, and followers, and to engage in passive rather than active consumption of media. Further research is needed to understand the specific mechanisms by which social media impacts mental health and to identify effective interventions to mitigate negative effects.

There are several potential limitations to this study that should be considered when interpreting the results. First, the sample size of 385 participants may not be representative of the larger population of Saudi Arabian youth. Additionally, the self-reported nature of the data may be subject to bias, as individuals may not accurately recall or report their social media habits. Finally, the cross-sectional design of the study means that it is not possible to establish cause-and-effect relationships between social media use and mental health. Another limitation of this study is that the definition of “youth” is not explicitly stated. It is possible that the experiences and activities of respondents aged 18 and those aged 35 may differ significantly. Additionally, the study did not explicitly consider the potential impact of gender on the relationship between social media use and mental health. Future research should aim to further explore these demographic variables in order to better understand the specific effects of social media on mental health among different populations. Such investigations should consider using larger and more diverse samples, as well as more robust research designs to further explore the relationship between social media and mental health.

6. Conclusions

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of social media on mental health among young people. Social media has become an integral part of modern society, with platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram offering a range of features including messaging, media sharing, and gaming. However, there is growing concern that the use of social media may have negative effects on mental health, particularly among young people who are more likely to use these platforms extensively. The study aimed to identify the specific features of social media that have the greatest impact on mental health and to examine the underlying reasons for these effects. To achieve these objectives, the study used AHP to assess the relevance and importance of eight social media features to 385 respondents aged between 18 and 35. The findings showed that likes, comments, and followers were the most relevant features to respondents, while gaming was the least favorite feature. In terms of the criteria influencing the respondents’ sentiments, entertainment was the most important factor, while privacy was the least important. The study concludes that social media can have both positive and negative effects on mental health, depending on how it is used and the specific features that are engaged with. It is therefore important for young people to be aware of the potential risks and to use social media in a balanced and responsible manner.

Appendix A. List of Questions Asked to the Respondents

Funding statement.

This research received no external funding.

Institutional Review Board Statement

Not applicable.

Informed Consent Statement

Data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

The author declares no conflict of interest.

Disclaimer/Publisher’s Note: The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of MDPI and/or the editor(s). MDPI and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content.

• Open access
• Published: 20 November 2023

Social media psychology and mental health

• Jaafar Omer Ahmed   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5904-3695 1  

Middle East Current Psychiatry volume  30 , Article number:  91 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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Social networks have become a part of individual lives nowadays, and most of the world’s population participates and has accounts on different social networks. This is a new phenomenon specific to the twenty-first century, as a subject entirely related to the human mind in terms of psychology and psychiatry is at the beginning of research. This study aims to provide a psychological interpretation of social networking issues.

The motives for using social networks are summarized within five main motivations: affinity, human needs, self-expression, information acquisition, and personal utility. Individuals use these networks as a source to hide their true personalities and show imaginary and desirable personalities. Despite the enjoyment of networks, individuals face two major risks: revenge porn and online bullying. Online social networks have many effects and dangers on individual mental health, so excessive use causes depression, anxiety, violence, addiction, and body image distortions in individuals. Although researchers focus on the negative effects of social networks, they still have several benefits for individual health.

Introduction

Over the past decade, the media has changed dramatically, from television and radio, which transmit information in a one-way manner and from which the information disseminated by companies and producers must be received by passive viewers, to a new media called social media or interactive media, which provides unprecedented opportunities for users to act as creators and users of media [ 1 ]. Social media is a visual communication method in which topics are created, shared, and exchanged by users, allowing them to interact with each other through text messages, images, videos, and private messages, to which other users can respond and participate [ 2 ]. From a psychosocial perspective, social networks are defined as “digital spaces” that allow users to organize both their social relationships on the network (organization, appearance, and comparison) and the individual’s social identity (identification and definition) [ 1 ].

Globally, the number of Internet users has increased from 361 million in 2000 to about 3.6 billion in 2016. The most widely used network for communication and social interaction is Facebook, which had 1.71 billion monthly active users in 2016 [ 3 ]. Social network Internet sites have become an integral part of adult life. In March 2018, 68% of adults in the USA had a Facebook account, and 75% of them used Facebook daily. Furthermore, 78% of young adults (aged 18 to 24) use Snapchat, and 71% use Instagram [ 4 ]. Twitter is the second most widely used social network after Facebook, with more than 500 million users worldwide. Half of Twitter users log in and tweet daily, resulting in more than 500 million tweets per day [ 2 ].

Technology generally has good and bad consequences. The Internet is a perfect example of this idea. In addition to improving communication with the world and democratizing information, the Internet has also allowed individuals to hide behind masks of anonymity [ 5 ]. From another perspective, consumer behavior through social media can have several unintended consequences for the user [ 3 ]. In this short article on scientific principles within the framework of the use of information, statistics, and scientific research, we will discuss the psychology of social networks and their mental health consequences. So that it can become a source to change attitudes and guide individuals, educators, and academics.

Motivations for social media engagement

Questions like, why do we use online social networks? It is not a simple question and is difficult to answer directly. Psychologists Prochaska and DiClemente, authors of the stages of change, say: “People change if they are under pressure or if the change gives them an important opportunity.” The existence of opportunity is the resource that the environment “gives” to a person who can acquire it [ 1 ]. However, our attraction to online social networks cannot be explained by opportunity alone [ 1 ]. Recent research on social media suggests that users participate in social networks for the following main reasons:

First affiliation

The main motivation for using social media is the individual’s desire to socialize and connect with others; people have a great need to connect, and social relationships are necessary for our well-being. Through the affinity impulse, social networks allow participants to express their affiliation, desire, or relationship with people, products, causes, and groups [ 2 ].

Second meeting human needs

One of the motivations for posting articles on social networks is based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory, which believes that participation in networks is to meet human needs, and the relations of consuming social media to these needs, according to the five main levels of the pyramid, are listed below [ 6 ]:

Physiological needs: Individuals sometimes post to benefit the health and well-being of their family and friends.

Safety requirements: Physical, mental, and economic security are essential for people when they select to post some material on their social media.

Love/belonging: Users generally post to feel socially approved by a group or by a particular person.

Esteem: People would like to quell the rewards-oriented portions of their brains, which helps explain why people post “mecentric” content frequently.

Self-actualization: As the most central aspect of the human need’s hierarchy, this aspect of social media posting exhibits when people post their successes in getting a new job, finishing a difficult project, or graduating from college, to name a few examples.

Third self-expression and identity representation

These social networks allow people to express themselves and reproduce their identities. Online networks allow individuals to share personal information, interests, beliefs, thoughts, and images with others, providing a place to express themselves on these social networks [ 2 ]. In other words, social networks are used to keep in touch with friends, make plans, get to know people better, and show off to others [ 6 ].

One of the most important motivations in a person’s life is the drive to create psychological ownership. The sense of psychological ownership, whether for tangible products (such as mobile devices or cars) or spiritual services (a sports team or social networking accounts), is easily recognized. One of the motivations for using social networks is the embodiment of this feeling that is created through activity and influence, self-identity, the presence of place, and excitement, which are available in social networks [ 3 ].

Fourth information retrieval and dissemination

Fast and cost-effective access, collection, and spreading of information through social networks are another motivation. Through it, users can learn about the lives of others and find out about their friends’ marriages, graduations, and upcoming events. One study found that 54% of communication between two friends who infrequently communicate with each other occurs through Facebook birthday reminders. This impulse is sometimes called the curiosity impulse, which is to be consciously satisfied with others by following them or viewing their activities online [ 2 ].

Fifth reward and personal utility impulse

Personal utility impulse.

People are looking for answers to the question “What's in it for me?” and looking for benefits in the form of information, incentives, pleasure, and comfort [ 2 ]. Instead, several studies indicate that the object must be capable of providing intrinsic stimulation to its users. Also defined as “the existence of the ability to experience reward without the existence of causes, it is an effective motivator; the pleasure of doing it becomes the main reward that encourages the person to repeat it” [ 1 ].

Researchers have found that “social and fluctuating incentives play an important role in media participation behavior.” Special studies have shown that the use of online social networks affects several parts of the brain. For example, increased likes on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram cause “brain activation in the reward-related pathway.” A study of the brains of adolescents while using social networks found that “seeing a photo with a lot of likes caused more activity in parts of the nerves involved in the process of motivation and social thinking” [ 6 ]. It is generally possible for an individual to have multiple motives for participating in social networking by posting, commenting, and liking at the same time.

Social media consumer behavior

Consumer behavior means interpreting the behavior of people on social networks, who they are, and how they behave [ 3 ]. In this regard, the following aspects are related to social media consumer behavior:

Personality changes

There are several unintended consequences for social network users. First, we know that the personalities people portray on Facebook are not the person’s true personality in many ways; instead, they do not reflect their true personality. Users try to reflect the personality they want to have [ 3 ]. In a study of Facebook users’ personality changes to answer the question, “How much do users change their identity and personality?”; the results show that, in general, everyone changes their identity to some extent by presenting the desired personality and their beliefs as “safe” or “appropriate.” There are three ways to demonstrate their identity [ 3 ]:

Authenticity: They show the same personality in and out of online social networks.

Facet management: Depending on aspects of their lives, users change their displayed identity on Facebook.

Impression management: Users are trying to be sure that their identity on Facebook is the way they want to be perceived.

Extroverted personalities

Personality is a set of individual traits characterized by the universality and diversity of people’s behaviors such as thoughts, feelings, and activities. Everyone has a unique personality through their thoughts and activities [ 7 ]. The Big Five personality model is the most used theory of personality. It consists of five main factors: extraversion, openness, neuroticism, agreeableness, and conscientiousness [ 7 ]. According to research, extraversion traits affect continuity on social media networks [ 1 ]. There are many positive social and economic consequences for consumers and businesses; for example, social networks help to connect with old friends, help to gain information, and give individuals a sense of human connection when they are alone [ 3 ].

Especially young people

Young people are increasingly using social networks such as Facebook and Twitter as an escape from external pressures that pose a threat to their mental health [ 5 ]. In most countries, online social networks have become an integral part of the education, culture, and social lives of young people. Data indicates that approximately 97% of adolescents use social networks [ 8 ]. Social networks allow users to share their thoughts and feelings, often without regard to their respect and values in the relationship [ 3 ]. And this is leading to many problems that are now part of individuals’ lives, such as immoral revenge [ 1 ] and online bullying [ 5 ].

Revenge porn

Due to the convergence of both the power of expression and the visual and auditory material, it has created a new online threat: posting “revenge porn” or posting nude or sexually explicit images of others with the intent to hurt them in this way [ 3 ]. This is new behavior and causes harm to users, disruption of educational plans, and sometimes suicide attempts [ 1 ]. Types of revenge porn posting behavior vary depending on the source, status, and purpose of the post. For example, if someone posts about others, we are not sure about the status of the post or the purpose of the post. Table 1 shows the types of revenge porn posting behaviors [ 3 ].

Online bullying

Traditional bullying is “a psychosocial problem of intentionally and repeatedly harming others and creating an imbalance of power between the victim and the perpetrator, with negative consequences for both parties” [ 3 ]. Traditional bullying mostly involved physical threats by a stronger person or group expressing their power over weaker people, but cyberbullying is often synonymous and generally involves an imbalance of social and psychological abilities [ 3 ]. Online bullying is defined as “Bullying over the Internet or by text message.” Chat rooms, social networks, mobile applications, and electronic games are some examples of online bullying [ 5 ]. According to surveys, the rate of bullying has increased annually, even though most parents reported that children are often bullied at school; 19.2% of children were bullied through social networks and online programs, and 7.9% of children were bullied through electronic video games [ 5 ].

Uses and gratifications theory

According to this theory, people actively strive to obtain a particular media subject for a particular desired purpose. This theory provides insight into when and how a media user becomes active or inactive and what the consequences of participation are. This theory also applies to users of social media. The theory has five main assumptions [ 1 ]:

The listener is active and purposeful in using media.

Media is used for enjoyment.

The media competes with other factors to meet needs.

People understand their uses, motivations, and preferences and even communicate with researchers about their options.

Listeners are the individuals who can judge the value of the material in the media.

Mental health consequences

There is an ongoing debate about the impact of online social networks on mental health. Studies have had mixed results, and several studies indicate that using social networks as an inactive person or using information without direct social contact hurts individual well-being [ 9 ]. In a study with adolescents, participants generally believed that social networks had a negative impact on an individual’s mental health, but the study also reported some positive effects. The authors found that social networks are generally harmful to adolescents’ mental health [ 8 ].

Depression and suicidal thoughts

A study has found that social networks are a threat to individual mental health. Participants felt poor self-confidence, depression, and suicidal thoughts were negative consequences of social networks [ 8 ]. For people under the age of 25 who are victims of online bullying, their risk of suicide attempts is doubled [ 5 ].

Accumulation of information

One of the characteristics of the news of this century is the large amount of information that consumers are exposed to. The news information published in the past 30 years is more than all the information published in the past 5000 years [ 3 ]. The research found that social networks affect the buildup of information in the following ways [ 3 ]:

•Increased amount of news information

•It is very difficult to avoid exposure to the news.

•Uncertainty about the veracity of the news

•Uncertainty about the intentionality of the news

•Presentation of irrelevant material

A study of 143 university students at the University of Pennsylvania found that the group that used social networks (Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat) for 10 min less a day than the other group had lower levels of loneliness and depression. The study concluded that “Limiting the use of social networks to 30 min a day improves an individual's sense of well-being” [ 4 ].

Anxiety and stress

Several studies have shown the negative effect of social networking on stress and anxiety [ 9 ]. One of the problems of social media is the spread of false information, known as fake news, which is a major source of anxiety [ 10 ]. Similarly, excessive use of social media platforms has hidden and invisible harms for the individual, such as decreased sleep, reduced personal happiness, lower academic performance, and undesirable psychological consequences such as anxiety and depression [ 11 ].

Spouses’ jealousy

Providing a lot of information about individuals’ social aspects, emotional relationships, and current activities on social media may cause feelings of jealousy in spouses. Research suggests that excessive use of Facebook or excessive participation in Facebook can lead to jealousy and a lack of marital satisfaction [ 1 ].

Social networking and self-comparison can make people feel inferior to others, jealous, and angry [ 9 ]. A large amount of research has been done on the effect of exposure to violent media on violent behavior, especially in online modes such as gaming sites, Facebook, and chat rooms. Researchers found that exposure to violent media causes individuals to become aggressive and engage in violent behavior [ 2 ].

Social networking addiction

There is ample evidence that excessive use of social networking sites may lead to symptoms of drug addiction, such as the importance of the behavior to the individual, mood changes, tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, relapse, and problems due to addictive behavior [ 12 ]. In a study of adolescents, despite being the main users of social networks, most of them reported that social networks are somewhat addictive [ 8 ]. Since the use of social networks is related to the reward system in the human brain, which is a source of abuse such as drug use and gambling, users of social networks should be aware of this risk [ 6 ]. Facebook addiction is one example; an individual is likely to become addicted to using any other social network [ 12 ]. A study of university students in China using a private survey found that 14.8% of respondents were addicted to using social networks. Evidence suggests that the rush to use technology, which is at the heart of technology addiction, including social networking, has an impact on feelings of burnout and emotional boredom caused by social media networking [ 11 ].

Body image distortion

Several studies indicate that traditional media (television, programs, and advertising) influence women’s decisions to undergo cosmetic surgery. This effect is more pronounced on social networks, according to a study of 118 women aged 18–29 about the effect of seeing women who had undergone cosmetic surgery on their self-esteem and desire to undergo cosmetic surgery. The study found that seeing pictures of people who have had cosmetic surgery on social networks affected women’s desire to undergo cosmetic surgery [ 13 ].

As mentioned, in the past, traditional media has influenced changes in an individual’s perception of his or her body image through advertising. Social networks have several differences from traditional media in terms of their impact on body image [ 14 ]:

In social networks, the users are themselves, unlike traditional media, which was dominated by artists and advertisers.

People show their desired imaginary style on social networks. They only post their attractive photos (including beauty), removing unwanted and ugly photos.

Social networks contain pictures of many different people (such as friends, family, strangers, and celebrities), and research suggests that comparing yourself to friends has a big impact on body image.

In addition to posting photos, people often post or comment on social networks related to the person’s appearance, which affects the user’s attitude toward their body.

Research suggests that searching for positive posts by others on social networks affects an individual’s well-being and self-comparison. They compare themselves to people who are higher and lower than themselves. Therefore, the use of social networks easily encourages social comparison [ 9 ]. Social networks such as Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter contain visual and verbal posts about an imaginary body image and encouragement to build a “thin body encourager” culture [ 3 ]. Research has shown that thin advertisers negatively affect an individual’s perception of physical appearance and self-assessment of attractiveness [ 3 ].

Related studies have shown that social networking use (especially Facebook) is associated with body image distortion among young women and men [ 14 ]. Self-comparison of individual appearance also plays a role in the relationship between social networks and body image [ 14 ]. Similarly, frequent use of Instagram is associated with views of body image [ 4 ].

Psychological benefits

Although researchers are focusing on the negative effects of social networks, there are still several benefits for individual mental health. For example, they provide many opportunities for individuals to build friendships and happiness; especially, young people can easily build friendships and strong bonds because of easy access to information and the interests of their friends. They also feel more independent and develop their decision-making and critical thinking skills. Studies have also mentioned the following benefits [ 6 ]:

Social engagement with a group that shares the same interests

Encourage and motivate a positive lifestyle in terms of health and the body

Having support groups on social networks

Keep and build new relationships

Familiarity with new ways of thinking

Online social networks have a great impact on the mind and mental health of individuals; nowadays, most people have accounts on social networks and use them daily and constantly. It is important to understand this issue scientifically and know how to deal with it.

If social networks are used by adults with a sense of responsibility, it is a good opportunity to discuss, improve social relationships, and do business. Conversely, when used irresponsibly by very young people, it can cause problems and discomfort that may not be erased [ 1 ]. Research has been conducted on several psychological aspects of these networks, all of which point to the dangers to the mental health of individuals, especially young people and adolescents, who are the most involved and easily influenced by these networks and large companies and institutions.

There are ways and measures to use social networks worldwide, and researchers and educators are constantly trying to interpret this phenomenon.

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Ahmed, J.O. Social media psychology and mental health. Middle East Curr Psychiatry 30 , 91 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s43045-023-00362-w

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• Social media psychology
• Cyberbullying

Why I'm Skeptical About the Link Between Social Media and Mental Health

The evidence on this topic is still underwhelming..

Posted March 20, 2023 | Reviewed by Devon Frye

• What Changes During Adolescence?
• Find a therapist to support kids and teens
• Many people are blaming social media for a February CDC report on teenagers' poor mental health.
• In reality, studies show mixed findings and vary in quality. There is no scientific consensus on how social media affects mental health.
• Trying to restrict young people's social media usage may backfire and teach kids and teenagers the wrong lesson.

So much commentary has emerged about American teenagers ’ mental health since the incredibly bleak CDC report was released in February. A lot of people believe social media usage is to blame for these recent trends, especially for teen girls. But psychologists, particularly developmental and clinical psychologists who work with adolescents, are not uniformly backing the “social media hypothesis.”

Here's why I remain skeptical that social media use is responsible for rising distress.

• Studies show conflicting results. Some researchers find links between social media use and well-being, and others do not, or find mixed results. Some developmental psychologists go as far as to suggest that social media might even have positive effects on well-being.
• Studies vary in quality. Some folks claim that if there are 30 studies published on a topic, and 17 of them (i.e., a majority) report a correlation, then we can be confident that this correlation exists. I don’t buy this. What if those 17 used poor methods while the other 13 used stronger methods? As we learned before , people are not accurate in reporting how much time they spend on various activities, and researchers recommend objective measures for app usage. Let’s remember: quality over quantity. Even hundreds of crappy studies shouldn’t outweigh a handful of good ones.
• “Who’s on first? What’s on second?” Even if there is a link between social media use and mental health, it’s not clear which precedes the other. It’s kind of a cliché to say, “correlation doesn’t equal causation.” But what do we really mean by that? Does anyone really think that depression causes increased social media use? Well, that may not be such a crazy idea after all. Some psychologists suggest that teenagers turn to social media in order to cope with negative emotions . We saw this during the COVID lockdowns, when teens were physically isolated but were still craving social connection. Some longitudinal studies show that when teenagers’ depression gets worse, that predicts using social media more, but not the other way around.
• There’s a missing cognitive link. We still don’t know what exactly about social media would make people feel distressed. Is it social comparison? Sedentary lifestyle? Sleep disruption? Physical isolation? There’s no consensus on this. And simply pointing to generic “ screen time ” doesn’t help clarify things.
• There is no clinical significance. Of the studies showing a link between social media use and mental health, they do not suggest an increased risk for mental illness (e.g., bipolar disorder ). This is an important distinction. Just because someone feels upset doesn’t mean they have a mental health condition. Researchers suggest that digital technologies are “unlikely to be of clinical or practical significance.”
• Social media is evolving. Does anyone really think that Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Reddit all have the same social or psychological properties? Perhaps there was a fleeting moment in recent history when people on social media typically encountered photos of their friends looking unrealistically awesome or beautiful, which caused some kind of negative social comparison that was especially detrimental in teenagers. But this is no longer the norm. On most social media platforms, masses of people are consuming content that is generated by a small group of creators. Plus, most teenagers don’t even use Facebook anymore , which is the platform that has been most extensively researched. And weren’t teenagers in the early 2010s most strongly influenced by Tumblr culture? Social media apps are not a monolith.
• We’ve been on this path for a long time. In North America, rising depression and distress have been going up for 80 years. This is something that even researchers who blame social media as a causal factor (like Jean Twenge) have acknowledged. Why weren’t people in the 1980s or '90s asking why adolescent depression was at an all-time high? This isn’t new. And it’s going to keep getting worse in the absence of major cultural adjustments. We aren’t a mentally healthy society, and we haven’t been for a very long time.

There Is No Consensus Here

Among scientists who study adolescent mental health, most are not concerned about social media use. A few of them are concerned, and they should be taken seriously. But it’s important to keep in mind when a passionate advocate like Jon Haidt openly admits that he is in a minority of scholars with this viewpoint. That’s very important context for this discussion, and one of the reasons why I respect Haidt as a scholar.

We can have conversations about common-sense reforms to social media apps for the betterment of society. That’s unobjectionable. But we should refrain from making strong claims or prescriptions in the absence of strong evidence. For example, if one recommends that we restrict young people’s digital technology usage until they pass through puberty, is there any evidence to suggest that this will have a positive effect on their well-being? I remain skeptical.

Let's Not Make Things Worse

In the words of Greg Lukianoff, "We're teaching young people the mental habits of anxious and depressed people." If we try to restrict young people's social media use, we’re making this exact error. We’re imparting to adolescents the lesson that they’re incapable of developing good mental health without adult intervention. Seems like a really bad idea to me. We should be teaching them resilience .

I believe that poor mental health in teenagers stems from broader societal problems that must be addressed with more creative solutions designed to maximize psychological need fulfillment and self-determination . If we create environments and communities in which teens can flourish, then I don’t see social media having detrimental effects on a mass scale.

Cauberghe, V., Van Wesenbeeck, I., De Jans, S., Hudders, L., & Ponnet, K. (2021). How adolescents use social media to cope with feelings of loneliness and anxiety during COVID-19 lockdown. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking , 24 (4), 250-257.

Heffer, T., Good, M., Daly, O., MacDonell, E., & Willoughby, T. (2019). The longitudinal association between social-media use and depressive symptoms among adolescents and young adults: An empirical reply to Twenge et al. (2018). Clinical Psychological Science , 7 (3), 462-470.

Odgers, C. L., & Jensen, M. R. (2020). Annual research review: Adolescent mental health in the digital age: Facts, fears, and future directions. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry , 61 (3), 336-348.

Dylan Selterman, Ph.D., is an Associate Teaching Professor at Johns Hopkins University in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. He teaches courses and conducts research on personality traits, happiness, relationships, morality/ethics, game theory, political psychology, and more.

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Are Smartphones Just a Scapegoat for Our Unhappy Children?

Why ditching phones won’t save the kids..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

I feel like all the trains in Italy. Cancellato!

Cancellato! I once got stuck in Pisa when they canceled the trains.

Yeah. It was a great opportunity for me to tell my kids about the failures of European social welfare capitalism.

Oh, good. Good.

The kids love that. [MUSIC PLAYING]

From New York Times Opinion, I’m Ross Douthat.

I’m Michelle Cottle.

I’m Carlos Lozada.

And I’m Lydia Polgreen.

And this is “Matter of Opinion.”

We’re — [LAUGHTER] no, we’re reunited. We’re all recording —

And it feels so good.

(SINGING) Reunited —

— in the same room together. I could almost touch all of my co-hosts.

Please don’t.

And then Carlos would call H.R.

But I will not because we’re talking about disconnection, virtual alienation. We’re going to talk about kids and smartphones.

Dun, dun, dun.

So there is a lot of evidence that kids — American kids, maybe kids around the developed world — are not doing so well over the last 10 years. Not just in a sort of kids being kids way, but there is a real shift in rates of depression, anxiety, mental illness diagnoses, suicide and suicidality. All of these things are up for young people, and so are hours spent on smartphones.

And there’s a widely circulated theory, seemingly plausible, but also hotly contested, that screens and social media are responsible for making teenagers, especially, unusually unhappy. So this is a big problem since screens and smartphones are sort of the defining technologies of our age. And I’m hoping we can resolve this problem here today in a podcast. [LAUGHTER]

Maybe not. But maybe we can debate some solutions, responses, and talk about what might be going too far in our desire to protect kids. So let’s get started with a personal question. For those of you, us, who have kids or teenagers, in the house or out of the house, what are the rules for smartphones in your home?

So I’ve got the oldest, I think. Mine are 20 and 18. So right now there are no rules. It’s obviously a free for all. But when they were —

It’s a vicious landscape.

It’s “Lord of the Flies” at Michelle’s house.

The only contact I get is when somebody wants to text me for money. But —

That was me, so I’m sorry about that, but —

Dang, Ross! So going back, though, I think we hit the smartphone button when they were in seventh grade because that’s when they went to middle school, and that’s kind of just — that was the standard around here. And then we tried to set limits on screen times and things like that. And I have to say the pandemic made that infinitely more complicated.

So first rule of parenting is you don’t talk about parenting. [LAUGHTER]

No, the first rule of parenting is that each kid is different, right? So I have three kids. One kind of mid-teens, one early teens, and one is finishing up elementary school. My oldest, who is 16, has a smartphone. He only got it last year. And he uses it mainly to be in touch with us, with his editor at the student paper, with his friends.

My daughter who’s 13 has one of those little mini old-fashioned iPods which she uses to communicate with text and email with friends, with her dance group or her orchestra friends, and to listen to books. And my youngest, who’s 10, wants an Apple Watch, but isn’t getting it. [MICHELLE LAUGHS]

They don’t use any kind of social media. We don’t ban it, but we discourage it. And part of the trick is that they really don’t have a lot of free time between theater, or dance, or baseball, or student journalism. They don’t have a lot of time to go on social media. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that it stays that way, at least until they reach the age of reason, the age of reasonableness. [LAUGHS]

We’re still waiting on that at my house.

But that is —

Good luck with that.

— the way it works so far in our home.

Huh, that’s interesting. I mean, I don’t have kids, as you all know. But I’ve tried to imagine what rules and limits would I want to set. And I think in some ways, Carlos, what you’re describing, it sounds like both an ideal but also very tough. Because in order to make sure that your kids have really, really full lives, it probably requires a lot of engagement from you and your wife. And living in the modern world —

Little sleep, yes. [LAUGHTER]

— we’re all very, very busy. And —

And think about the way that I grew up — and we’re all Gen X — and I had perhaps an extreme version of the free range childhood. Even though my mother was technically a stay-at-home mom, she did not want to see us home all day. And we sort of ran wild. It’s hard for me to imagine wanting anything different for my own children. But I realize that’s not the world that we live in.

But Ross, you have the youngest kids of all of us. So you’re just staring this down, and you have a bunch of them. So —

We — well, yeah, and the oldest is 13, and she still does not have a phone of any kind. And my assumption is that we will crack and get her some kind of what my kids call a dumb phone next year for eighth grade. She is trying to negotiate with me to get a smarter phone, insisting that she would never use social media. She will probably invoke the idea that she’s so busy, the excuse —

The lie my feeds are feeding me?

The lie your kids are feeding you. But it is very unlikely that we would crack on that. But we really haven’t entered fully into this world. But I want to pick up on Lydia’s comment about the free range childhood, because one of the reasons we’re talking about this this week is that this debate has been running for a while, but it’s resurfaced because of a new book by Jonathan Haidt called “The Anxious Generation,” that’s basically Haidt making the case not just that there’s something specific about, let’s say, the social life of teenage girls on Instagram or TikTok or the social life of teenage boys playing video games, that’s a problem for mental health, but also that this is a substitute for exactly the kind of childhood you’re describing.

So it’s not just the screens themselves are the devil. It’s also that the screens themselves have reshaped social life and eliminated certain features of childhood that taught people how to be adults, taught people how to navigate interpersonal dynamics in person, how to communicate with the opposite sex, how to settle fights on the playground with their friends, this kind of thing.

Haidt has a number of critics who basically say he’s making a correlation/causation mistake. That, yes, it happens to be that mental health has gotten worse over the smartphone era, but that does not prove that the phones are the problem. Do you guys buy the argument?

I mean, I’ve read the competing correlation/causation arguments, and, of course, have looked in detail at every single study and weighed them —

I have been personally running regression analyses in my spare time.

I was going to say, I have so many histograms, you would not believe it. [LAUGHTER]

You would not believe the number of histograms. But to me, the bigger question is one of emphasis. Should we be more concerned by the vacuum that was created by putting children into a much more protective bubble? Is the problem that we need to solve the transformation of childhood into what many kids experience as much more tightly controlled and scheduled and mediated through parents as opposed to mediated through your friend groups and learning how to build your own boundaries and relationships and things like that, or do we tackle the problem at the level of smartphones?

Look, I personally believe that I have a dysfunctional relationship with smartphones. And so it’s very easy for me to look at kids and be like, oh, yeah, of course they must also have a very dysfunctional relationship. But honestly, I don’t know.

I think it’s always a problem to put too much emphasis on any one particular culprit, and it is generally our impulse to blame technology. I mean, TV — did TV ruin kids? Probably. But that is —

I mean, look at us.

— one of the panics that we had. And then for years everyone told us that violent video games absolutely positively were turning our children into sociopaths. This, on one level, is what we do. We decide it’s something that we can tackle simply or blame simply. But then there’s 30 questions I have as to what we’re really worried about here.

I mean, are we upset about kids sitting around on their phones rather than playing outside, worried about them doing less in-person socializing, worried about them becoming addicted to external affirmation from their online groups, upset about them having access to scary news and inappropriate information, upset that they’re not as independent, worried about bullying? I mean, there’s so many things that fall into this category that we’ve just decided are all about smartphones.

So I think the virtue of the Haidt argument, it’s a technology is doing something bad argument that has a pretty narrow and focused zone of concern. And that zone of concern is the fact that young people report being unhappier as young people than was the case generally in our cohort and preceding generations. And this pretty clearly tracks to a kind of point of divergence.

I think 2012 to 2014 is sort of a break point in the data. If you just look at the charts that Haidt puts together, you say, well, yeah, something clearly happened in this window that is not just teenagers or teenagers. You need some explanation. And that’s why his critics have tended to also put forward contingent time bound speculations. Like it’s the aftermath of the financial crisis, it’s the rise of school shootings and school shooting drills. There is, I think, a quest for a particular kind of explanation because you have this divergence in the data.

Now, there is also the response or argument that what we’re seeing here is just better diagnosis. That kids have had these mental health problems all the time, and, for better or worse — many people would say for better, some people would say for worse — we’re talking more about mental health. Maybe that’s the whole divergence. We’ve become more open to these discussions or more likely to offer these diagnoses, and that alone is enough to —

We’re a therapeutic society.

Right. We’re a therapeutic society and it’s finally achieved takeoff, and that’s where we are now. I try to be skeptical of the Haidt thesis because it confirms my priors. Like Lydia, I have a toxic relationship to my smartphone. I don’t use that much social media. But the social media I use I’m addicted to and make the excuse that it’s part of my job. So I have a natural inclination to buy into the argument. So I try and be more skeptical of it. But I think that right now it’s a pretty parsimonious explanation for at least some of this divergence.

You’re saying parsimonious in a positive sense?

Right. In a positive — in a positive sense, yeah.

Because the data are quite dramatic. I mean, I was looking for other sources of information about this because Haidt, in his book, talks about, actually, this data is global. These are things that we’re seeing in other countries. So I was looking at other alternative sources of data on this.

And there was a UNICEF report that was published in 2020. And it’s really interesting actually how much of an outlier the U.S is. And this is a place where I actually have a significant amount of skepticism about the Haidt book. It counted 38 of the wealthiest countries in the world, and the United States was 32nd in terms of mental well-being on this list. And the top five were not what you would expect. They were the Netherlands, Cyprus, Spain, Romania and Denmark. So this is just —

I mean, I would have predicted Romania.

Yeah, absolutely.

But maybe not the rest.

Absolutely. The reports in this study on the effect of technology use was one quarter the size of the effect from bullying, for example. So I came to this information saying, like, oh, yeah, this all sounds plausible. But the more I dug into other sources and other cuts at looking at this question of child happiness, the more skepticism that I had that this one explanation was enough. I think you need to take the changes of childhood and technology together.

Haidt does push back against the critics who say it is a monocausal explanation by saying that, look, I’m talking about the changes to the independent childhood that we had in the ‘70s or the ‘80s versus today. And I accept that defense of his. But in some ways, if you look at just his body of work, even just his “Atlantic” articles over the years, he does feel like he’s beating the same drum over and over again with slightly different speeds.

I read each piece individually and I feel persuaded. I read them together and I feel suspicious, right? I don’t mean suspicious in an ill intent on the part of the writer kind of way. But I think of a worldview that maybe explains too much.

And I also wonder if different kids are different. So when I was a kid, my mother was obsessed — obsessed with us not watching too much television because she thought it was going to rot our brains. She would come home and she would put her hand on the top of the TV set. And if it was warm, she’d know — [LAUGHTER]

— that we’d broken the rules. And my mother did not mess around. She’d unplugged the TV. She’d get out a pair of scissors and she’d snip off the plug.

As a punishment, so that we would not watch it again.

Totally, totally badass.

That’s real parenting.

But I want to tell you — I want to tell you, it’s even better parenting. You know what my brothers and I did? We would go to RadioShack and we would buy a plug, and then we taught ourselves how to reattach a plug and then not make it look like —

Yeah, but this is exactly —

You have skills.

This is the bypass of childhood.

Kids are going to bypass any form of control over —

But Haidt would say that is the kind of childhood creativity that is being lost, the ability to do end-arounds when your parents —

To McGuyver your TV set!

Ross you mentioned school shootings. I mean, this month, believe it or not, will mark 25 years since Columbine. And the kids that Haidt is talking about are kids that have grown up entirely in a world formed by that experience. I don’t just mean Columbine, but I mean the experience of lockdown drills in schools, knowing that every day they’re going to a place where they’re meant to be taught and educated and protected, but that they feel at risk.

The reason my son has a smartphone is because there were bomb threats at his school, which he covered as a student journalist. But that’s why he has a smartphone to begin with.

I find that argument totally unpersuasive to explain the divergence that you see —

Oh, no, no, I meant —

— starting in the early 2010s.

No, I’m not saying — I’m not saying —

It doesn’t track, particularly, with the rise of school shootings. It doesn’t track at all with general violence in schools, which was much higher in the 1980s and early 1990s than today. And it does, allowing Lydia’s point that the data is complex, it does show up — the teenage mental health issue — in lots of other countries that don’t have active shooter drills and so on.

What’s odd in this debate is that Haidt is making an argument that in a way tracks pretty well with a lot of traditional left wing preoccupations. He’s saying a bunch of big rapacious capitalist entities, in order to make a profit, are exploiting your children and destroying their mental health.

And a lot of people on the left are like, no, that’s not satisfying enough. It has to be something that Republicans did, right? Because Silicon Valley isn’t coded as Republican. It has to be climate change because we can blame Republicans for that. It has to be school shootings because we can blame Michelle’s Southern relatives and their guns for that.

That feels very sensitive.

I don’t know. It’s like you’re just looking for — I mean, there are many reasons why children can be anxious all at once. I worry a little bit about Haidt pointing to smartphones as the overwhelming reason. There are multiple reasons why any one kid can be having trouble.

And another — and this is where I was headed. I wasn’t saying that therefore the explanation is school shootings. In the panoply of possible reasons for kids to be struggling, another is — Lydia and Ross have mentioned that you have your own toxic addictive relationships with your phones. I mean, these are also kids who have grown up with parents —

With parents, yes.

— who are entirely tethered to their devices and who basically — a few years ago, I read this book by Sherry Turkle called “Reclaiming Conversation,” and she had a line that has stuck with me since then where she says that all our relationships now come with the assumption of divided attention. And that is all the more so with children seeing the divided attention that their parents, already distracted and busy and tired parents, give to them.

All right, let’s take a break. And when we come back, we’ll talk about whether we should be even looking for solutions here. And if so, what they might be.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

One of the things that I’m interested in is when you start talking about what to do about it, then it gets really sticky, though. And I think one of the things that does bother me is when the states start looking at, well, how are we going to save our children?

They start talking about putting limitations on what kids can do on their phones. And you quickly get into questions of First Amendment rights and things like this. None of which is going to matter if you’ve got kids who are watching their parents sit on their phones all day long 24/7. That’s like lecturing kids not to do drugs while you’re sitting there dropping acid.

So there is a question about how we’re going to tackle this. And this just seems to be one of those areas that we rush to because it seems very easy to tackle. We’ve had several states try and limit what kids can do and what their social media account age is. But it’s a lot of constitutional questions, and a lot of time and energy going into something that doesn’t strike me is going to be all that useful.

I mean, just on the personal side, Michelle’s first, right, since you’re the senior parent in this conversation, meaning the one with the most experience.

Yeah, call me old.

The one with the most experience.

Walk that one back, Ross.

The wisest.

Your kids are basically through high school into college, right?

Mhm. And if you look back over the last 10 years, setting aside the state, setting aside government, are there things that either you as a parent or you as a consumer of school-based services — are there things that you wish you had done differently or things that you wish your kids’ schools had done differently?

So, now, one problem that I do think parents have is once you hit a certain age with kids, you can’t limit their screen time because they’re doing homework online. So I would try to keep limits on my kids’ screen time, and they would just be like, well, we’re just doing math homework on our computer.

And unless you are going to stand over that child every minute — and let’s be clear, it wasn’t a question of I didn’t want to put in the time or effort to stand over my child. It’s also, you can’t police your children like that. I mean, you have to give your children a little bit of freedom to screw up or whatever. So it was absolutely impossible on some level.

It got even worse during Covid.

Yeah. And COVID —

It was impossible, where it all got conflated.

— completely — my kids’ friends and my kids themselves had real Covid isolation issues. And it became really dark at certain times. And it was really hard to tell whether being able to connect with their friends on their smartphones was helping or hurting or whatever because technology has taken over our lives. I tend to think that as a society when we’ve given up on being reasonable about something, we then try to put limits just on the kids.

I asked my daughter, who’s 13 — I told her that we were going to have this conversation, and I asked her what she thought about rules and limits and bans. And she said she didn’t have a problem with there being rules and limiting access to certain things. She’s like, we do that for lots of other stuff that seems OK. But maybe you all should have some limits, too. She felt that —

Her reaction was that it shouldn’t just be for children. That a lot of bad things happen on social media when adults use social media.

Yeah. I don’t how we think we can save our children if that’s the approach that we’re going to take.

Well, I guess I’ll speak up for the kids first approach then. I completely agree that obviously the example that you set for your kids makes a huge difference. And I obviously think social media and smartphones have a deranging effect on adults too. But childhood is both a era of greater personal social emotional vulnerability than adulthood and also a period in which we take for granted that it is possible to impose substantial regulations that in a free society we can’t impose on adults. And we do this with lots of things. We do this with driving. There’s lots of terrible drivers on the road, but we don’t say, oh, we can’t let adults drive because we’re showing kids that they’ll be bad drivers when they grow up. Same with alcohol, tobacco products, all of these things.

And we can argue back and forth about where the exact line should be. But I do think that social media age requirements, things like banning smartphones from schools and so on, are just obvious first steps, that don’t get you close to fixing all of the problems, but are things that you should just do and see what happens.

As you were talking, I was thinking about some of the cultural differences about this. I don’t think there’s any society that’s like, OK, we want to teach our children to have a healthy relationship with tobacco. But when it comes to alcohol, there is a different attitude. Alcohol is seen as an important source of conviviality, of pleasure, of enjoyment, and cultivating one’s temperate enjoyment of it is something that starts relatively early in life.

And let’s set social media aside for just one second and just talk about technology and screens in general. We are all going to live in a world where screens are going to be a part of it. And I’m not going to give my baby a bottle filled with watered-down wine, right? But I might give my 13-year-old, a very, very small glass of wine watered down with seltzer at Thanksgiving or whatever. That to me feels more of an approach that I could get behind rather than just ban it. And I think about my own consumption of television. I mean, I told that very funny story about my mom and cutting the cord. The reality is that if there is a television on in a room, I cannot pay attention to anything else. I mean, if there was a television over the other side of your shoulder, Ross, I would be so distracted.

Fascinating.

Whereas, my wife, who grew up in a household where the TV was on all the time, can just tune it out. It’s just white noise to her. So I guess if we’re going to live in a world with these technologies, how do we prepare kids to have healthy relationships to them, to turn them into tools that can serve them? The problem is if it just takes over your entire life. [LAUGHS]

To be the optimist — the cockeyed optimist here, right? Lydia brought up tobacco. The United States had a massive public health campaign against tobacco that, in fact, did lead to dramatic changes in smoking’s social acceptability and all of these things.

And there is this range of proposals in Congress. There’s the Kids Online Safety Act, which would require tech platforms to make various design changes. Protect Kids on Social Media Act, which would establish an age minimum and parental consent. And then there’s this general — there’s a lot of grandstanding in Congress about what Meta has done wrong and the different ways these platforms have exploited kids.

And to the extent that you find the public psychological health arguments around tech and social media persuasive, is there any law or public health measure that you would like to see pass or imagine would be helpful? Or does it just not seem like a political problem?

I’m not convinced it’s a political problem. And I also think a lot about the ways in which such laws could be used. As a queer person, I think about kids who are trying to figure out who they are and what are the places that they might connect with other people like them.

Obviously, I grew up in a connection desert growing up in East and West Africa. We didn’t even have a home phone for a while. So I don’t romanticize the disconnected life at all. I think loneliness has lots of different facets to it. And I think that IRL friendships are great. But friendships over distance I think can be very, very meaningful. We have a whole literature of epistolary friendships —

Letter writing is another lost art —

Another lost art. I mean —

— that the smartphone has killed.

Yeah. Voice memos on the other hand — [LAUGHTER] so, yeah, I’m skeptical about the role of legislation in this area. I mean, I think, actually, profound social changes are needed. I think that we need to rethink the way that we treat children in society, the amount of freedom, the amount of autonomy that we give them. Obviously I believe that they need to be protected from dangerous things. But — and this is just my bias from my own experience, having been a very, very independent kid — I’m a strong believer in child independence.

I think laws sometimes reflect social changes and sometimes anticipate them. And I would be open to a lot of the kind of reforms that Jonathan Haidt suggests, to some degree, of limiting access to social media. I’m persuaded by the potential educational impact of smartphone bans or at least severe reductions in smartphone use in schools.

At the same time, I still believe that there is a multiplicity of factors behind the mental health and well-being crisis that we’re seeing with kids in the United States. So I’m both open to them, but skeptical that they would solve the underlying issue that we’re facing.

All right, well let’s close out by just looking forward a little bit, because I’m curious where you guys think this debate will be in 10 or 20 years, maybe at the point where some of our children are parenting themselves.

Oh, I can’t wait for that.

Can’t wait for that. And grandchildren reversing the birth dearth. [LAUGHTER] Anyway —

Different podcast, Ross. Different podcast.

Different episodes.

But isn’t it all the same episode, Lydia? I’m curious, generally, because there’s also a way in which when technological change happens, sometimes by the time you figure out what’s going wrong in one particular dispensation, we’re headed into a new dispensation, right?

So just hearing the way that schools rely on the internet and tech for assignments and so on, does that survive the age of ChatGPT and AI assistants? Is it possible that we’re going to head into a landscape where all of education is going to have to recalibrate itself?

They’re never going analog again, Ross.

Well, that’s —

They’re not going back to analog. It’s too — it’s not going to happen.

OK, but so then what is the world on the other side of AI or on the other side of any other looming technological change, on the other side of virtual reality?

We don’t know. That’s what’s so great about it. Could you have predicted where we are now 20 years ago? I don’t think you could have. Come on.

I mean once that’s true once Elon Musk has put chips in all of our brains, then we’ll experience the singularity and we’ll know what’s happening.

All right, let me —

No, no, I have a real answer here.

Let me — all right, Carlos — but no, let me first say, I am detecting just an incredible level of fatalism from all three of you about technological change.

And I agree with all of you that, yes, of course, we are not undoing the internet revelation — excuse me —

See, Freudian — paging Dr. Freud.

We know what you want, Ross.

We know what I want. I want the singularity, too. But it seems to me that there’s a huge question here, which is, are we going to master these kind of technologies or be mastered by them? And I feel like, are all of you just content to drift into the Neuralink future? Carlos, the humanist, I appeal to you to close us out with resistance. Come now —

Hashtag resistance.

— speak for paper, speak for print, speak for analog.

I only read on paper. Here I am saying that on a podcast. Who’s read “Canticle for Leibowitz“?

Well, you know I have. That’s a —

It’s a book that I highly recommend. It’s a book in which the existential perils of technology are taken so seriously that we attempt to fully simplify our lives to purge ourselves of these technologies. Yet, inevitably we recreate them with the same destructive results. And just because it fails, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t make the attempt.

So I think it’s foolish to be optimistic in this world, but it is not foolish to be hopeful. But even as we make those attempts, I’m skeptical of a silver bullet answer to the problem that we’ve discussed today. We will simply move on to a new version of it, which then we will look back with longing on this simpler time. The way that Lydia talked about the television story, we’re going to talk about trying to — you remember back in the 2000s when we tried to regulate smartphones? And we didn’t know that the fill in the blank was coming next and that was going to be even more insidious and destructive.

Brain chip. Lydia is right. Brain chip.

No, but I think that’s — I think that’s a really good way of putting it, Carlos. And I think that the reality is that things stop being cool. Facebook has been abandoned to the boomers and —

Oh, you cannot pay kids to be on Facebook.

— other social media. And I think it’s one of those things that’s seen as a punch line. But kids reject the things that their parents are into, and are addicted to, and want to talk about, and want to focus on. And I think that things become not cool. And that’s definitely a thing that I’m seeing among young people that I know, that they’re like, you know what’s not cool is spending all your time on social media.

And on that note, I’m going to return home and explain to my 13-year-old daughter that it is her duty to make the smartphone uncool in her middle school and high school. And we’ll leave it there. And when we come back, we’ll get hot and cold.

Just tell her how cool you think it is and that’s going to do it.

All right, guys, it’s time to get hot cold. Who’s got one this week?

I’m hot cold this week.

So I just returned from “Matter of Opinion”‘s official vacation destination, which is Italy.

And I happened to be there during Holy Week. And so we did Palm Sunday mass and Easter Sunday mass in Venice. The Palm Sunday mass, it was, first of all, very few people. And we thought like, how on Earth, in Venice, on Palm Sunday, there are only 50 people in this church? Because we were at the Latin and Gregorian mass service. And we experienced —

Carlos, be still my heart.

My children experienced the Latin mass, which they had not done up to this point in their lives. And it was wonderful. We had an absolutely — see, I was afraid that this —

Ross is going to weep.

I was afraid that this would trigger an outpouring of Rossness. But it was so beautiful.

In a good way!

Just to stipulate for listeners, who may have some stereotypical view of me, I do not attend the traditional Latin mass.

Neither do I. And I went to Catholic —

I went to Catholic grade school, high school, and college. So I’ve been to many variations of our liturgy. And my wife and I were trying to explain to the kids, even whispering during the service, that they had entered a sort of time warp where they got to experience something that is a lot less common these days.

And I think of myself as very much a Vatican II Catholic. I’m all in favor of the opening up of the liturgical experience, of the role of laypeople in the church. But it took a long time. Palm Sunday mass is generally long. And the Latin mass version is, I think, a good bit longer than normal.

But even so, it was both a wonderful experience for me to think about a church before the church that I have known, and also for my children to have a sense of this experience and to have them feel — I hope some small part of them felt part of a much longer history and tradition.

That’s so beautiful.

You heard it here. I am hot on the Latin mass.

Ross is speechless.

I don’t have anything. I can’t add anything.

I’m hot on the Latin mass.

That sounds like a really, really amazing experience. I’m glad for you and your family.

That is downright beautiful.

Amazing. OK, we got to stop there before anything happens to spoil the Catholic mood.

Don’t say a word.

He says to the protestant!

He says to Michelle.

To the Southern Protestant.

I have not brought the Southern Baptist into this discussion!

OK, good. Guys, it’s been a pleasure. We’ll be back next week.

See you next week.

Good to be back.

Bye, guys. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Thanks so much for joining us. Give us a follow on your favorite podcast app and leave us a nice review for “Matter of Opinion” while you’re there, so other people can know why they should tune in, too, mostly for the Latin mass recommendations. If you have a question you think we should think about next, like why the Latin mass is awesome, share it with us in a voice — [LAUGHING]

— OK. Sorry. [LAUGHTER]

Carlos, this only happens once. I have to milk it. If you have a question you think we should think about next, share it with us in a voicemail by calling 212-556-7440 or send us an email by writing to [email protected].

“Matter of Opinion” is produced by Phoebe Lett, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, and Derek Arthur. It’s edited by Jordana Hochman. Our fact-check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Carole Sabouraud, and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. And our executive producer, as always, is Annie-Rose Strasser.

[SINGING IN LATIN]

• April 12, 2024   •   38:05 Abortion, Trump and Religion in Politics
• April 5, 2024   •   38:40 Are Smartphones Just a Scapegoat for Our Unhappy Children?
• March 29, 2024   •   36:17 Finding the Line Between Celebrity and Politician With Tressie McMillan Cottom
• March 22, 2024   •   38:05 Obama, Trump, Pence: Revelations From Reading the Swamp
• March 15, 2024   •   36:00 What Do You Do if You Hate Both Biden and Trump?
• March 8, 2024   •   41:36 Trump 2.0: ‘A Blueprint for Retribution’
• March 1, 2024   •   37:16 The Pro-Life Movement Had a Plan Post-Roe. The G.O.P. Didn’t.
• February 23, 2024   •   38:30 Will the Economy Favor Biden or Trump? Paul Krugman Weighs In.
• February 16, 2024   •   34:40 The Presidential Fitness Test
• February 9, 2024   •   35:37 Our Super Bowls, Ourselves
• February 2, 2024   •   42:02 The Gender Split and the ‘Looming Apocalypse of the Developed World’
• January 26, 2024   •   36:53 Could Israel Cost Biden the Election?

Hosted by Michelle Cottle ,  Ross Douthat ,  Carlos Lozada and Lydia Polgreen

Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’ Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

It’s not just bad vibes — America’s kids are not OK. As study after study shows worsening youth mental health, a popular theory has emerged: The rise of smartphones and the addictive nature of social media is making young people miserable. But can it really be that simple?

This week on “Matter of Opinion,” the hosts debate the myriad possible factors contributing to teenagers’ unhappiness, and discuss how parents, schools and the government can protect kids without doing further harm. Plus, a sui generis Lozada family vacation.

(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 24 hours of publication in the audio player above.)

Recommended in this episode:

“ The Anxious Generation ,” by Jonathan Haidt

“ Reclaiming Conversation ,” by Sherry Turkle

“ A Canticle for Leibowitz ,” by Walter M. Miller Jr.

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected] .

Follow our hosts on X: Michelle Cottle ( @mcottle ), Ross Douthat ( @DouthatNYT ) and Carlos Lozada ( @CarlosNYT ).

“Matter of Opinion” is produced by Phoebe Lett, Sophia Alvarez Boyd and Derek Arthur. It is edited by Jordana Hochman. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Isaac Jones, Efim Shapiro, Carole Sabouraud, and Pat McCusker. Our fact-checking team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

Michelle Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion and is a host of the podcast “Matter of Opinion.” She has covered Washington and politics since the Clinton administration.  @ mcottle

Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the author, most recently, of “The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery.” @ DouthatNYT • Facebook

Carlos Lozada is an Opinion columnist and a co-host of the weekly “Matter of Opinion” podcast for The Times, based in Washington, D.C. He is the author, most recently, of “ The Washington Book : How to Read Politics and Politicians.”  @ CarlosNYT

Lydia Polgreen is an Opinion columnist and a co-host of the “ Matter of Opinion ” podcast for The Times.

A new book has amplified fierce debate around teens, mental health and smartphones

A new book has embroiled the academic community in a heated debate over whether spending time on smartphones affects young people’s mental health and, if so, how.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s “ The Anxious Generation ,” published last week, argues that the smartphone-driven “great rewiring of childhood” is causing an “epidemic of mental illness.” He suggests four ways to combat this: no smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16, no phones in schools; and prioritizing real-world play and independence.

“I call smartphones ‘experience blockers,’ because once you give the phone to a child, it’s going to take up every moment that is not nailed down to something else,” Haidt told TODAY.com , adding, “It’s basically the loss of childhood in the real world.”

Phones and social media have become a ubiquitous part of everyday life. But as much as researchers study their impact, there remains no easy answer to how exactly these technologies affect the mental health of kids and teens.

Haidt’s book quickly has generated a wave of both support and backlash, including a viral review in the scientific journal Nature that argues Haidt is contributing to a “rising hysteria” around social media and screen time that’s unproductive in addressing the “real causes” of teen depression and anxiety.

“We have a generation in crisis and in desperate need of the best of what science and evidence-based solutions can offer,” psychologist Candice Odgers wrote in her scathing review. “Unfortunately, our time is being spent telling stories that are unsupported by research and that do little to support young people who need, and deserve, more.”

Over the past decade, scholars and politicians have grown increasingly concerned about the potential impact of social media and screen time on young people. A Senate hearing in January grilled the CEOs of several major social media companies on a variety of topics related to child safety, including their platforms’ impacts on youth mental health.

Also in January, California introduced a bill aimed at protecting children from social media addiction. And last week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a ban on children under 14 joining social media, which takes effect next January.

Research linking social media use to poor youth mental health led U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy to issue an advisory last year warning of social media’s potential harms to child and adolescent well-being. Up to 95% of youth ages 13 to 17 say they use social media, according to the report , with more than one-third saying they use it “almost constantly.”

Some academics and scientists remain unconvinced that current evidence shows a causal link between social media and poor mental health. Christopher Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University, said he believes the concern is part of a recurring moral panic largely driven by older adults.

He pointed to a cyclical pattern in which disruptive new technologies — from TV to video games to, more recently, generative AI — almost always undergo periods of uproar over their potential harms. He said the buildup of concern around smartphones started slower than most, only taking significant shape in the late 2010s.

But the toothpaste can’t be squeezed back into the tube. The kids who are on smartphones and social media now will be using those technologies well into old age, Ferguson said, and it’ll be their turn to “freak out” once a new, unfamiliar technology threatens to displace their habits.

“I just think this is how it is now. It’s just a matter of getting used to that,” Ferguson said. “For some reason, society always wants to throw a temper tantrum when a new thing comes along. And eventually, like all temper tantrums, they go away.” 

But researcher Jean Twenge, author of “Generations” and “iGen,” said there’s a “reasonably robust” consensus among academics that smartphones and social media are at least partially linked to the rise in teen depression, self harm and loneliness.

She said she believes the pushback comes from a smaller group of academics whose arguments imply that screen time and social media are harmless. Unlike Ferguson, Twenge said she believes the skepticism around them will continue to grow over time.

“The critics in this area need to answer one important question,” said Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University. “If smartphones and social media are not behind the increase in teen depression, what is? Because over and over, the answers that they have given have not been supportable.”

Ninety percent of this debate is basically just back-and-forths about different studies that are subtly designed differently and create totally different results.

-Joseph Bak-Coleman, an associate research scientist at the Columbia School of journalism

Joseph Bak-Coleman, an associate research scientist at the Columbia School of Journalism who studies collective decision-making, said part of why the effects of phone and social media use are so difficult to study is because research subjects cannot be fully isolated from the impact of these technologies.

This leads to conflicting research results, he said, as even individuals who eschew social media and smartphones still live within networks of people who do use them — and in a world already shaped by them.

As Bak-Coleman puts it: “ Ninety percent of this debate is basically just back-and-forths about different studies that are subtly designed differently and create totally different results. And then everyone fights.”

While social platforms and regulators have an obligation to figure out how to protect children and teens, he suspects any restrictive protections would be a “nightmare” to enforce. Measures such as removing access to phones entirely could cause different troubles in a world where kids rely on cellphones to contact their parents, he said, and where many aspects of life now take place in the digital realm.

And because the average effects of social media use might also look different from the effects on those who are most at risk for certain harms, Bak-Coleman said it could be more worthwhile to hone in on specific concerns instead of trying to identify a broad trend in how phones impact mental health.

“Rather than asking, is it a net negative or positive, which is an absurd discussion,” he said, “it’d be much nicer if we could ask: What are the impacts? To who? And which thing does it, and how can you change it?”

Angela Yang is a culture and trends reporter for NBC News.

Putting the Freak-out Over Social Media and Kids’ Mental Health in Historical Context

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Educating kids in the era of social media feels like uncharted territory—but is it?

The specific challenges of social media are unique: A problematic video can ricochet around the school (or halfway around the world) nearly instantaneously. But technological advances bringing new social problems is a tale as old as time, according to Ioana Literat, a professor of communication media and learning technologies design at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Literat is also the associate director of the Media and Social Change Lab at Columbia where, she said, she spends a lot of time thinking about the social and educational implications of media for young people.

Education Week asked Literat about those implications and what educators may be getting wrong in their assumptions. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What nuance do you think the current debate about social media and youth mental health is missing?

I think an important part of nuancing this discussion, the current debate, is also by historicizing it. We like to think that everything with social media is unprecedented. Even in the name of the technology itself—new media, right?

There’s this myth that it’s new, but actually, we see these [kinds] of moral panics around social media illustrated in previous communication technologies as well.

One of the classes that I teach at Teachers College is history of communication. And that’s exactly how I start: I pick out these quotes that are about moral panics about social media,—or [my students] think they’re about social media—but then I reveal them to be about the telegraph, and the telephone, and the postal service and newspapers. So, it’s not really that new.

Whenever there is a communication technology that has such a huge social impact, there is a tendency to panic, and there is a tendency to go between utopia and dystopia with no middle ground. Often when we do see these moral panics, the object of the panic is young people and women.

Yes, societally we are freaking out, but we’ve freaked out before with every major technology cycle and almost every time it’s about young people and women—especially young girls.

Is there’s some legitimacy to this moral panic? I’m thinking about multiple investigations into how men use social media to contact young girls.

I don’t mean to say, ‘Oh, everything’s exactly the same,’ just that this historical perspective definitely matters. And because the reach and the scale is so grand with social media, we need to pay particular attention to the harmful effects, whether these effects are deliberate or not, whether they are direct or less direct.

On the one hand, [there are] the safety issues that you mentioned. There are challenges with misinformation, cyberbullying, the negative impact on young people’s self-esteem, which we see a lot more with young girls and female-identifying youth than we see with male-identifying youth.

But I will also say that in general, my research perspective is one of ... belief in young people’s agency. I think often the question is: What is technology doing to young people? And I like to ask: What are young people doing with technology?

A lot of my own work is in this area: how participating in causes online, or even just following, can really broaden young people’s understanding of social political issues, foster empathy, and hone their civic voice. Because it’s not like you just know how to be a citizen or a participant in public life. You actively need to work on that skill, and to work on that skill, you need a safe space. And often for young people, for better or for worse, social media is that space.

What are some skills schools should be teaching to promote a healthy use of social media?

When it comes to media literacy, for instance, still so much of it is centered around consumption: How to be good consumers of social media or online content.

There’s definitely a need for more of a focus on production. Everybody’s a content creator these days, and for young people that’s so important.

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Social media is a lifeline for mental health, not a curse, according to CDC's own data

Being online helps teens avoid suicide, self-harm and other risks. why do media and lawmakers blame it instead, by mike males.

The “sharp uptick in depression, anxiety, loneliness and suicide among young people is directly tied to the wide distribution of smartphones,” declares a typical press splash on psychologist Jonathan Haidt ’s newly-released book. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek’ declares that Generation Z’s “mental health crisis” is “in part caused (by) their constant exposure to social media,” another reads amid a daily frenzy of panic condemning teens and screens.

In fact, top authorities barraging lawmakers and the public with a panicky, ill-founded crusade are distorting vital information and ignoring the real issues underlying teens’ mental health and how they use social media.

Let’s begin right at the source: the Centers for Disease Control’s massive, 116-question 2022 survey of 7,000 teenagers that defined and documented the teenage “mental health crisis” – the one almost everyone cites (or, rather, miscites). The full survey is readily downloadable for analysis. Yet, none of the relentlessly alarmist authorities , including Haidt and Murtha, appear to have done so – and, as a result, they may be endangering teens even more.

The one CDC finding the alarmists balloon into a larger campaign citing superficial, correlation-equals-causation “studies” is that teens who go online regularly (one to four hours a day) or frequently (five or more hours a day) report poorer mental health and more sadness than do teens who rarely or never go online (less than one hour a day) – with girls the most affected.

Unfortunately, these same professional and academic authorities omit or flatly falsify the important complexities the entire CDC survey and similarly reliable, comprehensive surveys and meta-analyses show. So what does the data really say about the link between social media and teen mental health?

Fact 1: Social media use is associated – overwhelmingly – with greater teenage safety

Analysis of the full CDC survey reveals a completely different picture, beginning with a fascinating paradox. Table 1 shows that the same online teens who report being more depressed then go on to report fewer suicide attempts and many fewer  hospitalizations for self-harm than do rarely-online teens.

Three to four times more teens are bullied at home by grownups than are bullied online or at school.

That seemingly contradictory finding for social-media-using teens – more depression, less suicide – invites scrutiny by conscientious social scientists. The reason few did is suggested by the disturbing factor the CDC survey really associates with teen depression: violent (injurious) and psychological abuses by parents and household grownups, reported by an alarming 55% of teens, including 58% of teens under age 16, 63% of girls, and 74% of the LGBQ teens.

Three to four times more teens are bullied at home by grownups than are bullied online or at school . Teens bullied at home are many times more likely also to be bullied elsewhere – a reality authorities ignore.

Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter Lab Notes .

While teens who regularly or often go online are 41% less likely to attempt suicide and 62% less likely to be hospitalized for self-harm than rarely-online teens, teens regularly abused by parents/adults are nine times more likely to attempt suicide and 20 times more likely to suffer injuries from self-harm compared to non-abused teens.

So obsessed are the most publicized authorities with social media that they overlook far more important issues. Teens whose parents lost jobs during the pandemic are 34% more likely to suffer poor mental health, 55% more likely to suffer parental abuse, 55% more likely to attempt suicide and 140% more likely to self-harm compared to teens with employed parents. In families where parents lost jobs, twice as many girls as boys reported poor mental health and frequent abuses.

Standard mathematical regression analysis of the CDC survey shows parental abuses are associated with 13 times more teen depression than superficially blamed on social media. Even the most prominent social-media-blamers like psychology professors Jean Twenge and Haidt acknowledge \ the effect of social media on teens’ happiness is “small”, which large-scale meta-analyses also support .

Yet, authorities persist in insisting social media must be the big culprit. It’s as if researchers studying the causes of lung cancer arbitrarily decided to exclude the biggest factor — smoking tobacco — and instead crusaded against a superficial low-level correlation like listening to country music. After all,older rural white people suffer the highest lung cancer rates.

Fact 2: The virtual world is not more dangerous than the real world

The “virtual universe… is more dangerous in many respects … than the physical world,” Dr. Haidt declares . But the nirvana many authorities assume teen life would be if unsullied by screens is the diametric opposite of teens’ reality.

Have health authorities, condemning the much-publicized increases in suicides and drug overdose deaths by adolescents over the last decade, analyzed what actually drives those tragedies?

With startling consistency, the CDC survey shows that teens who are not online are the ones most at risk of suicide, self-harm, being raped, pharmaceutical abuse, other drug abuse (especially heroin), fighting, weapons carrying, unprotected sex, school and dating violence, getting fewer than seven hours of sleep a night and missing school due to fear. A few risks, like cigarette smoking, binge drinking and marijuana use are similar among teens regularly or frequently online as among non-online teens.

Fact 3: The most troubled teens are those who benefit most from social media

Teens who report being depressed, bullied by parents or LGBQ (what the CDC categorizes as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or questioning sexuality) are much less likely to attempt suicide, self-harm or other risks if they are online regularly or frequently compared to their counterparts who rarely/never go online.

LGBQ teens who are online are 45% less likely to attempt suicide, 54% less likely to suffer self-harm injury, 20% less likely to get fewer than seven hours of sleep a night and much less likely to be raped, binge-drink, abuse pills, try heroin, fear going to school, etc., compared to those rarely or never online. The greater online safety of teens abused by parents and household adults is similar.

Fact 4: Social media connects teens with others who help them

The table shows that nearly all the rarely-online teens who consider suicide actually go on to attempt suicide and one-third suffer self-harm, compared to fewer than half and 10%, respectively, of teens who go online regularly or frequently. Why are online teens of all ages and genders less likely to suffer serious outcomes than their non-online counterparts?

We don’t know exactly, but there are indications. The CDC and Pew Research surveys report teens (particularly younger, abused and depressed individuals) often go online to connect with people, such as “family, friends, or other groups” who “can support them through tough times,” as Pew noted. That’s one reason why more online hours is crudely associated with more teen depression – a classic case of “correlation does not mean causation.”

Fact 5: Over 700,000 parent-aged adults died from soaring overdoses and suicides from 2011 through 2021 as teen “depression” rose – also ignored by authorities

Might that mass parent and adult self-destruction make teenagers more depressed?

From 2011 to 2021, deaths from suicide and overdose rose from 2,337 to 3,532 for ages 16 to 19, and from 544 to 1,052 for ages 10 to 15. Suicides and drug overdose deaths among adults of parent ages (30 to 59) soared even more, from 49,676 in 2011 to 96,522 in 2021 – exactly the period teens were becoming more depressed. During the 2011-21 period, suicides and overdoses claimed a staggering 722,000 grownups ages 30 to 59 – roughly equivalent to the entire population of Denver disappearing.

Might that mass parent and adult self-destruction make teenagers more depressed? Compelling studies strongly implicate parents’ abusiveness , mental health and drug andalcohol problems for harming teens’ mental health and fostering suicide and other risks. While the CDC did ask about parents’ abuses and unemployment (both strongly connected to more teen depression, suicide attempts and self-harm), surveys haven’t asked about grownups’ drug/alcohol, mental health, sexual abuse and related issues.

Bizarrely, today’s authorities, led by the Surgeon General, seem completely uninterested in how these glaring parent and adult crises might affect teens. No, they insist the problem is low-association villains like TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and smartphones.

Fact 6: Teenage unhappiness relates to larger social conditions

Four times more liberal than conservative teens use social media to organize and activate, Pew Research finds. Girls, in particular, have dramatically brought down their crime, unplanned pregnancy and school dropout rates and are flooding universities and job sectors in record numbers. These are hardly signs of depression. Young liberals are also much more likely to be informed about global events such as climate change . What we term “depression” and “unhappiness” seem to motivate them to action .

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Conservatives aware of these facts must be delighted at the help of liberal politicians in cutting off their young liberal base from social-media communications, information and expression. Gleeful conservatives , exploiting the official myth that teens who report being sad, depressed and anxious must be “mentally ill,” pronounce “children with liberal parents more likely to suffer mental health problems.”

A rough test of the claim that “conservatives are mentally healthier than liberals” is that during the period in question, 2011 to 2021, suicide rates among 10 to 19-year-olds rose 1.6 times faster to levels 1.3 times higher in Republican-controlled states than in Democrat-controlled states, a trend most affecting wWhite teens. This is yet another indication that the “depression” teenagers report today is connected much less to suicide or mental illness than to larger social issues only now being assessed.

Current discussion tells us more about authorities’ mental state than teens’

Repeated panics over young people’s mental health have surfaced every few years over the past century, featuring condemnations of dime novels, nickelodeons, jazz, horror comics, reefer madness, drug lyrics, Hollywood this or that, rock’n’roll, rap, video games and now social media. Many authorities have always found it more satisfying to point accusing fingers at popular culture and cast themselves as heroic rescuers with cries of “the children!” than to confront distressing family and social conditions. Then, we wonder why the United States can’t seem to solve its globally disgraceful social and health epidemics.

Notable exceptions exist. In a 1936 speech to young people , President Franklin Roosevelt, dismissing experts proclaiming 1930s youth as “ lost ” to anxiety, depression and lassitude, declared that young people were right to be unhappy. Ridiculing the “two or three or four new panaceas in every day's papers” to cure young people, FDR welcomed the young “measuring the present state of the world out of your own experiences” and actively challenging its flaws.

Such dynamic affirmations are impossible to imagine today, in which the mental state of leading authorities is more obviously in question than that of young people. Far from being a “mental health problem,” young people’s unhappiness around the world may be the instigator of critically-needed social change.

about mental health

• From conspiracy theories to manifesting: How to navigate the age of "magical overthinking"
• Native American communities have the highest suicide rates, yet interventions are scarce
• Loneliness in America is a crisis. The solution is more structural than individual

Mike Males is a senior researcher at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco.

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