Congressional Hearings & Schoolhouse Rock

The time I testified before the Texas House of Representatives

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10 min read

It was the week I returned from maternity leave, and the “unread” section of my email inbox was growing at an alarming rate. I was triaging emails in typical fashion—delete, ignore, respond, mark as unread and avoid—when I came upon an unfamiliar subject line: Invitation from the Texas House of Representatives. This was new. The email noted that an “academic research focused” hearing would be held the following week, by the Select Committee on Youth Health and Safety. They asked me to present my research on the impacts of social media on youth mental health. The email signed off with: Thank you for your time and for all you do at Brown, one of the finest institutions of higher education in the world.

Despite the suspiciously flattering sign off, the email was not spam. I began considering what to do.

First, I asked some follow-up questions: what exactly did they want me to speak about? We would appreciate it if you could prepare about 10 minutes of remarks summarizing your research and contextualize it with the revelations from the Facebook whistleblower, they replied. Ten minutes. Plenty of time to summarize a topic you’ve spent the entirety of your professional life thinking about.

Next, I refreshed my memory on a few key issues. What, exactly, was a select committee? What typically happens in a state congressional hearing? How, again, does a bill become a law? I watched this Schoolhouse Rock video. It turned out not to be relevant.

Finally, I set out to thinking—was this something I wanted to do? From what I knew of the activities of the Texas House of Representatives, I was relatively confident that I disagreed with much of the recent legislation that had passed. Would speaking at this hearing mistakenly signal that I agreed with these stances? I considered the potential professional consequences as well. What if I misspoke, or was trapped into speaking about something on which I didn’t feel comfortable commenting? Recordings of these proceedings are readily available online¹. Would the Twitter mob come after me? Would I be fired from my job, doomed to a life of watching Schoolhouse Rock on repeat from my couch, wondering where things went wrong?

I put that image out of my mind (though not that song—a single listen to the classic How a Bill Becomes a Law can stick with you for weeks). I considered the upside. I’d have an opportunity to share what I knew, to lay out the facts about teens and social media use, to try to insert some scientific background into the national (or at least Texas-wide) conversation. Why, I reasoned, was I doing research in the first place, if not to share that knowledge with the people who can do something about it? I decided to go for it.   

So, I wrote up my testimony. I put on a blazer. I positioned my Zoom camera away from the baby play gym behind me. And I spoke to the committee, who were sitting in a semi-circle behind a large wooden desk at the front of a windowless room.

In some ways, it was very much what I expected when I imagined how state government proceedings go. There were technical issues with the Zoom set-up. There was an animated discussion about how glasses of water would be obtained for the committee members. There were people coming in late, people forgetting to mute, people looking bored. There were position statements, irrelevant to my testimony, masquerading as questions: I’ve heard that some psychologists helped Facebook make their products addictive to kids. I think this is absolutely terrible and immoral (etc.). Those people should be removed from their profession. Do you know about this? There was also my nagging sense that the proceedings would do very little to influence any policy outcomes.

In other ways, though, it was unexpected. There were polite thank you’s for information they’d learned. There were earnest questions, about how parents—including some of the committee members themselves—can help their teens use social media in healthier ways. There was thoughtful discussion about how we can promote teens’ mental health. There was mention of one committee member’s young kids, who reportedly maintain an Instagram account for the family dog. There were diverging viewpoints among the committee members, some of which seemed to align with my own, and all of which, I realized, would contribute to the conversation and eventual decision-making.

As the hearing ended, I closed my laptop and walked into my kitchen to pour a bowl of cereal. The committee members, 2,000 miles away, went to vote on bills that would affect tens of millions of lives. And yet, I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were just as likely to soon find themselves, wearing sweatpants and blazers, sitting at their kitchen counters eating Honey Bunches of Oats. They were, it seemed, just humans, with strengths and flaws, and things they knew about and many things they didn’t know about. They were humans who, like the rest of us, are trying desperately to navigate questions about technology to which we do not yet have answers. Questions about how worried (if at all) we should be for our children, about who (if anyone) should be held accountable, and about what (if anything) we can do about it.

Here’s what I said to them.

Written Testimony: Texas House of Representatives Youth Health & Safety Select Committee

Thank you Chair Lozano and Members of the Committee.

My name is Dr. Jacqueline Nesi, and I am a Clinical Psychologist and an Assistant Professor at Brown University. I study the impact of social media use on adolescent mental health and development.

I often get asked the question: is social media good or bad for teens’ mental health? Unfortunately, the current state of the research does not provide a clear answer. What we know is that the relationship between social media use and mental health is complex, and social media use affects individuals differently. Serious mental health concerns like depression, anxiety, and suicidality are the result of a complicated interplay of social, genetic, and developmental factors, and cannot be attributed to a single cause. Social media alone does not cause mental illness in teens. But it certainly plays a central role in their mental health – in both positive and negative ways. Social media offers exciting opportunities and benefits for teens. But it also creates real risks and challenges, especially for those who are already vulnerable.

Social media use is ubiquitous, used by 97% of teens,² and its rise has coincided with an alarming increase in rates of depression and suicide among teenagers. The increase in suicide deaths has been especially drastic among pre-teen girls (ages 10-14), with a four-fold increase between 1999 and 2017.³ These co-occurring trends have led to concerns about a potential link between social media use and mental health. Such concerns have intensified in recent weeks with the release of Facebook internal documents and testimony by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen.

But the truth is that these leaked documents, describing the results of Facebook’s internal research, do not tell us anything new about how their products impact teens’ mental health. In fact, these documents offer just a single, small set of studies which, like all studies, suffer limitations that prevent us from drawing any firm conclusions. Understanding an issue like this one requires looking at the full body of scientific evidence, conducted over the course of more than a decade. And unfortunately, this body of evidence does not give us simple answers.

Here is what we do know.

Adolescence is a developmental period characterized by heightened sensitivity to social information, concern about social status, identity exploration, and the development of close relationships with peers. Social media is perfectly aligned with these developmental goals—with opportunities for frequent engagement with and feedback from peers, as well as for self-expression. Social media is especially appealing to youth in this age range.

For many years, research on the topic of social media use and adolescent mental health was largely focused on the time that teens were spending online. Many raised concerns that increased time on social media (or “screen time”) was associated with risk for mental disorders. However, to date, this research suggests that how much time teens spend on social media is not reliably linked to mental health. Results of these studies have been mixed, and suggest that if there are any effects of time spent using social media on mental disorders like depression or suicide, such effects are small.

But does this mean that teens’ use of social media is irrelevant when it comes to their mental health? It does not. Increasingly, researchers are investigating the what and the who of social media. That is, it has become clear that in order to understand the impact of social media on mental health, we need to understand what teens are doing online and which teens are especially vulnerable to the risks of using social media.

In terms of what teens are doing online, the research suggests benefits and risks. It is important to note here that social media is a fundamentally different environment than the offline world. Yes, the experiences young people have online reflect many of the same joys and challenges teens have always faced. But on social media, these experiences – both positive and negative - are amplified. They happen more publicly, more quickly, more frequently, at a larger scale.

In terms of benefits, social media offers adolescents opportunities for social connection, friendship maintenance, and creative expression. In a nationally representative survey, 81% of teens reported that social media allows them to feel more connected to their friends.⁴ Social media also offers critical opportunities for social support, particularly among teens who may not readily have access to communities of supportive peers in their offline lives, such as LGBTQ youth.

It also creates important opportunities for education, awareness, and support, particularly for youth struggling with their mental health. In a recent study I conducted with over 400 adolescents with significant mental health concerns, the majority reported relying on social media for support or encouragement.⁵ A nationally representative survey conducted in 2020, in the midst of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, found that youth with depression were more likely than those without depression to say that social media was “very important” for helping them feel less alone.⁶

Despite these benefits, the potential risks of social media are significant. Social media provides quantifiable indicators of social status – likes, views, comments. Recent work suggests that receiving fewer likes leads to more negative emotions, and that youth with more negative responses to receiving few likes may be more likely to develop depressive symptoms over time.⁷ Cybervictimization, or the experience of being bullied online, is associated with risk for a range of mental disorders, including depression and suicidal thoughts and behavior.⁸ ⁹ Youth of color who experience or witness online racial discrimination are more likely to experience symptoms of anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem¹⁰—and the majority of these youth report sometimes or often encountering racist content online.¹¹

Body image concerns are another risk, with a recent experiment showing that young women who were exposed to edited social media photos reported worse body image than those exposed to unedited photos.¹² Other studies have found that exposure to risky behaviors on social media, like alcohol or other substance use, may increase risk for engaging in these behaviors.¹³ And although mental health information is readily available on social media, it is not always clear to youth whether that information is accurate or verified.

Finally, for youth who are already vulnerable, social media may create new risks related to suicide. While the teens in my studies recognize the potential advantages of social media use for connecting them with resources, helping them gain support, or allowing others to intervene when they are in crisis, they also highlight concerns. My recent study of almost 600 psychiatrically-hospitalized youth found that more than a quarter had viewed content (such as posts or photos from peers) related to self-injury or suicide on social media.¹⁴ And even if they try to avoid such posts about suicide, the teen participants in my studies report difficulty doing so due to targeted algorithms and online communities of peers with similar symptoms.

As with all research, these studies have limitations. We need more research to determine exactly how, when, and for whom social media is more harmful than helpful. But one overarching conclusion can be drawn from this body of work: social media plays a critical role in the mental health of young people.

And because of this, the way that we approach teen social media use is essential. Legislators, social media companies, researchers and other stakeholders must work together to make changes that best serve our youth.  

Social media is not going away. It is a central component of adolescents’ lives. But in order to protect teens’ mental health, our goal must be to maximize the benefits of social media while minimizing the risks. And this must be the goal of social media companies as well. Social media companies can make changes to their products to better serve young people, and they can do so in ways that are transparent and collaborative. If the conversation around the Facebook files teaches us anything, it is not new revelations about the links between youth social media use and mental health, but rather, it is that we have a long way to go toward this goal.

Thoughts on this post? Ideas for future posts? Questions? Reply directly to this email!

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Thank you to my friend and colleague Dr. Sophie Choukas-Bradley for her invaluable feedback and ideas on this written testimony.

1. Recording available here. Skip to 24:55 to hear my disembodied voice deliver testimony. No, seriously, you don’t see my face at all. The Q&A starts at 33:34 (still no face).

2. Pew Research 2018

3. CDC 2017

4. Pew Research 2018

5. 57% of youth used social media for support or encouragement in the two weeks prior to hospital admission. Nesi, Wolff, & Hunt (2019). Patterns of social media use among youth who are psychiatrically hospitalized. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

6. 28% of youth with moderate depressive symptoms versus 13% of youth without depressive symptoms.

7. Lee et al. (2020). Getting fewer “likes” than others on social media elicits emotional distress among victimized adolescents. Child Development.

8. Fisher, Gardella, & Teurbe-Tolon (2016). Peer cybervictimization among adolescents and the associated internalizing and external­izing problems: A meta-analysis. Journal of Youth and Adolescence

9. Nesi, et al. (2021). Social media use and self-injurious thoughts and behavior: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology Review.

10. Tynes, English, Del Toro, Smith, Lozada, & Williams (2020). Trajectories of online racial discrimination and psychological functioning among African American and Latino adolescents. Child Development.

11. 69% of Black youth and 67% of Latinx youth report “sometimes” or “often” encountering racist content online.

12. Kleemans, Daalmans, Carbaat, & Anschutz (2016). Picture perfect: The direct effect of manipulated Instagram photos on body image in adolescent girls. Media Psychology.

13. Moreno, D’Angelo, & Whitehill (2016). Social media and alcohol: Sum­mary of research, intervention ideas and future study directions. Media and Communication.

14. Nesi, Burke, Lawrence, MacPherson, Spirito, & Wolff (2020). Online Self‑Injury Activities among Psychiatrically Hospitalized Adolescents: Prevalence, Functions, and Perceived Consequences. Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology.

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