This week, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy issued a warning about the risks social media poses to the mental health of children and teens. Mental health among adolescents has declined over the years, with a growing body of research suggesting social media platforms may be partly to blame. But experts wonder how much of an impact they will have and whether the newly proposed laws would actually improve the situation or would violate free speech without addressing the root of the problem. We continue to discuss whether
Numerous studies have documented sharp increases in rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, self-harm and suicide among adolescents in the United States and elsewhere since the advent of smartphones and social media. In fact, suicide is now the leading cause of death among her 13-14-year-olds and the second leading cause of death among 15-24-year-olds in the United States. In October 2021, the American Academy of Pediatrics declared that “suicide is a national condition.” A child’s mental health emergency,” he said, adding that the coronavirus pandemic had exacerbated an already existing crisis. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a similar warning for 2022, after the agency found that nearly half of high school students reported feeling consistently “sad or hopeless” in the previous year. According to the CDC, LGBTQ women and their teens appear to have particularly poor mental health.
However, the role social media plays is widely debated. Some researchers, including Jean Twenge of San Diego State University and Jonathan Haidt of New York University, argue that social media offers the most plausible explanation for problems such as rising teen loneliness. and sound the alarm. Other researchers are more silent. In 2019, Jeff Hancock, founding director of the Stanford University Social Media Lab, and his colleagues completed a meta-analysis of 226 scientific papers dating back to 2006 (the year Facebook went public). The researchers concluded that social media use was associated with modest increases in depression and anxiety, but also a commensurate improvement in feelings of belonging and connectedness.
“At the time, I thought of these as small effects that could balance each other out,” says Hancock. Since then, however, a flurry of additional research has made him a little more concerned. Hancock still believes that for most people, most of the time, the impact of social media is minor. Sleep, diet, exercise and social support collectively have a greater impact on psychological health than social media use, he said. Nonetheless, social media can be “extremely psychologically harmful” when used in negative ways, such as cyberstalking ex-lovers, he said. “We see this in many other addictive behaviors, such as gambling,” says Hancock. “A lot of people can gamble, and it doesn’t matter. But for certain subsets, it matters a lot.”
Several recent studies have attempted to shed light on the link between social media and mental health, for example, whether social media use causes depression, or whether depression makes people more likely to socialize. We are investigating whether they are more active in the media. Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Alexei Macalin and two of his colleagues, in an effort to provide evidence of causation, used Facebook, which was phased out at various U.S. universities from 2004 to 2006, and the compared mental health surveys received by Their study, published in 2022, found that rates of depression and anxiety surged after Facebook’s arrival, and academic performance declined. McCallin said much of the harm they documented came from social comparisons, with students browsing peer profiles online and believing that they:[have] Live better, party more often, have more friends and look better than them. Facebook parent company Meta did not respond to a request for comment by the time of this writing.
Other studies have yielded similar results. In one paper, participants were paid to turn off Facebook for four weeks before the 2018 US midterm elections, and reported increased happiness and life satisfaction when not on the platform. . And in February 2023, researchers at Swansea University in Wales found that reducing social media use by just 15 minutes a day could have physical health benefits, including boosting immune system function. I discovered.
“Overall, there is a growing and consistent picture of how social media actually affects mental health,” McCallin said. “I’m not saying that social media can explain 100 percent of the increase in mental health problems…but it could explain a significant portion of it.”
Mitch Prinstein, chief scientific officer of the American Psychological Association (APA), which recently published recommendations for youth social media use, said that social media is inherently neither harmful nor beneficial. Point out no. “If I was 12 and reading a book Scientific American “I go to social media and talk to my friends about how interesting the article is,” he says, but it’s a far cry from “going to sites that tell you how to cut yourself and hide from your parents.” . He suggested that social media companies remove potentially harmful content and make social media safer for young people.
In addition to harmful content, Prinstein is also concerned about social media’s impact on young people’s sleep and, by extension, brain development. “Kids shouldn’t call after 9 p.m. unless they get a good night’s sleep,” he says. But actually closing social apps or putting down your phone can be difficult, Prinstein said. This is partly due to the design of these platforms that aim to keep the user’s attention as long as possible. Chris Perry, executive director of the nonprofit Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development and former senior adviser to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, agrees. Young people, she said, fear not only being drawn into app design, but also disappointing their peers. “Kids really fear that if they don’t immediately like what their friends post, they will lose their friendship and become unpopular,” Perry said.
A flood of new research into the harm of social media is prompting lawmakers to act. With the exception of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, which was passed many years before smartphones and social media, the US Congress has never seriously engaged in children’s online behavior. “It’s like the Old West in a way,” Prinstein says of the lack of directing. But since around 2021, a Facebook whistleblower testified that the company knew its platform was negatively impacting the mental health of young people (a claim Facebook denied), Republicans and Democratic lawmakers are following Europe’s lead in tightening internet regulations. At the federal level, members of Congress have introduced a number of overlapping bills. At least two outright ban social media use by children under a certain age, while others restrict targeted advertising and data collection, and prevent young users from sharing their personal information. This allows for more detailed management. Protect information, prioritize parental supervision, facilitate additional investigations, and hold social media companies accountable for harmful content viewed by minors. Nothing has been passed yet, but President Joe Biden seems to mostly agree with these measures. In his State of the Union address in February, Mr. Biden said, “Ultimately, social media companies must be held accountable for the experiments they are doing on our children for profit.” And on the same day as the Surgeon General’s warning this week, the White House commissioned a task force to analyze ways to improve the health, safety and privacy of children online.
Meanwhile, the state legislature also entered the fray. California recently passed a law aimed at protecting children’s online data. Montana has banned TikTok. And Arkansas and Utah, among others, required social media companies to verify the age of their users and obtain parental consent for minors to open accounts. Similar bills are pending in many other states.
The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is probably the most high-profile pending federal bill to date. The bill, proposed by Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, tells social media companies to protect minors from content deemed dangerous. is obligatory. It also aims to protect your personal information and curb addictive product features such as infinite scrolling and autoplay. KOSA’s supporters include Children and Screens, the APA, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and several parents who lost their children to suicide after being subjected to relentless cyberbullying.
On the other side, organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit, and the American Civil Liberties Union, have opposed KOSA, saying it could increase online surveillance and censorship. For example, these parties have expressed concern that state attorneys general could weaponize the law to suppress content about things like transgender health care and abortion. This is especially problematic as it can counteract some of the positive effects social media has on teens’ mental health.
Researchers agree that social media can help children, especially by connecting with like-minded people and promoting emotional support. This seems especially important for “people from underrepresented backgrounds,” Prinstein said. “Whether you’re the only person around you who looks like you or the only person in your family who has the same identity as you.” Doing so may be detrimental to members of that community. “That support, and even access to information, is a huge benefit,” Prinstein says. “Back in the day, there really wasn’t any other way to get that resource.”
Jason Kelly, associate director of digital strategy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said he believes stronger antitrust laws than legislation like KOSA, which could, for example, encourage competition between platforms and encourage each platform to improve. said it would be preferable. A winning user experience. With more options, social media companies will be forced to “address the interests and desires of their users, as well as ways of disregarding their safety and privacy,” he said.
As the debate continues over the best legal fix, essentially all researchers Scientific American I spoke to agree with one thought that more information about these platforms could help us understand exactly how they are causing harm. To that end, KOSA will require social media companies to make their confidential datasets available to academics and nonprofits. “There’s a lot we don’t know, because we’re blocked,” says Hancock.
if you need help
If you or someone you know is struggling or considering suicide, you need help. Call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, or go online. lifeline chat.
