The mistake we're making on teens and social media

I've been studying this for 15 years. We're asking the wrong question.

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7 min read

This week, Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch published new research suggesting that social media is causing significant harm to adolescents. Also this week, news outlets reported on a recent study of over 25,000 U.K. adolescents showing that the time adolescents spent on social media had no impact on their mental health over time.

What is going on here? Why does this keep happening? Why does it feel like this debate is going in circles?

I have a theory.

We’re too focused on mental health

For years, the debate about social media’s impact on adolescents has been largely framed around questions of mental health.

There’s the historical question: Did the introduction of social media in the 2010s cause the rise in adolescent mental health issues? And the contemporary question: Is social media bad for adolescents’ mental health?²

Now, I obviously care a whole lot about mental health. That’s my whole job! I can think of few things more important to our society than supporting kids’ mental health, and much of my career has been devoted to answering those questions.

But here’s the issue: these questions are very hard to answer. The first concerns population-level, historical trends, which are incredibly difficult to prove with the research methods we have available to us.

The second is so vague that it’s barely useful: asking whether anything is “bad” for “mental health” is going to get you a big, fat “it depends,” because that’s how mental health works. It is complicated, and different for every child, and depends on lots of other factors.

When it comes to evaluating social media’s impact on kids, these are not actually the first questions we need to answer.

So, what’s the problem?

By framing the conversation about social media entirely around mental health, I’m concerned we’ve done ourselves a disservice.

We’ve created a situation where proof is difficult, if not impossible, to come by. We’ve delayed action—by lawmakers, schools, parents, and others tasked with doing what’s best for our kids—because we’ve been stuck, forever continuing that search for proof.

And we’ve distracted ourselves from the obvious issues with social media that are right in front of us.

What are these “obvious issues”?

Here are just a few of them:

• Too much time. 45% of teens say they spend too much time on social media, and a quarter (24%) of girls who use TikTok say it gets in the way of their sleep every night. When teens (and adults!) regularly say they spend more time than they want to on a platform, this, in itself, feels like a problem to me.

• Contact by strangers. The majority of girls who use Instagram (58%) and Snapchat (57%) say they’ve been contacted by a stranger on these platforms in ways that make them uncomfortable.

• Suicide- and eating disorders-related content. Roughly 4 in 10 girls who use social media say they’re seeing this content monthly or more.

• Unwanted sexual advances. According to Instagram’s own internal research,³ 13.9% of teens (ages 13-15) said they received “unwanted sexual advances” on the platform in the past week, with 93.8% of those from strangers.

• Unwanted nudity. Also according to Instagram, 19.2% of teens said they encountered unwanted nudity on the platform in the past week.

• Violent content. 65% of adolescent boys say they see content related to fighting, guns, or weapons at least sometimes.

• Betting or gambling content. 43% of boys say they see content related to gambling or betting activities at least sometimes.

Of course, many of these problems will be relevant, in some way, for teens’ mental health. But here’s the thing: harm to mental health does not need to be our threshold for whether something is wrong.

How do we decide if something is wrong?

There are many situations where we have decided—both from a regulatory perspective, and, simply, as a society establishing cultural norms—that children or teens would be better off not doing something, even if it has nothing to do with harming their mental health.

Sometimes this comes from concern about children’s judgment or cognitive development: voting, opening a bank account, making medical decisions, signing legal contracts.⁴

Sometimes it’s about what we deem appropriate for children: working a full-time job, owning a gun, going to nightclubs, drinking alcohol.

Could these things affect a child’s mental health? Certainly. But when we’re deciding whether they’re appropriate, that is generally not the litmus test.

The wrong litmus test

The problem with “mental health” as the litmus test is not only that it’s hard to prove, but also that it’s poorly defined.

When psychologists say “mental health,” they often have specific diagnoses or disorders in mind—mental health is the absence of “mental illness.”⁵ When my friend talks about her mental health, she might be referring to her mood, or the fact that she’s tired today, or the benefits of watching Heated Rivalry.

Depending on who’s saying it, “mental health” can be as narrow as a set of DSM criteria, or as broad as a negative feeling.

To level set, as I’ve written before, I actually do believe social media likely played some role in the rise in mental health issues we’ve seen in adolescents, though I do not think we have strong evidence proving this theory. I also believe that for more vulnerable teens, it’s possible that social media could be a factor contributing to mental health concerns. But for the majority of teens, using social media will not suddenly cause the onset of a mental illness: most average, healthy teens, with appropriate boundaries in place, are going to be just fine.

And this is where we run into problems. Our messaging about the harms of social media does not emphasize specific risks. It does not offer accurate, balanced information about the likelihood and severity of harm.

Instead, it offers fear and panic. “Mental health” becomes a conveniently vague, broad, and scary term on which to project our fears about social media. It’s destroying the children! We can shout from the rooftops. It’s BAD for their MENTAL HEALTH!

This does not help anyone.

Where do we go from here?

If the debate about social media and adolescent mental health seems like it’s going in circles, well, that’s because it is. We have one side arguing that social media is destroying adolescents’ mental health. We have the other side, shaking their heads, arguing mental health is complicated, and pointing out flaws in the studies.

The sides are talking past each other. One reason for this, I’d argue, is our framing of the debate. When our entire focus is on some vague notion of “mental health,” we forget to look at the obvious issues in front of us.

Instead of offering parents accurate information and realistic guidance, we scare and confuse them.

Instead of protecting kids from unwanted sexual advances and content rabbit holes, we offer them ominous warnings that these tools are bad for their mental health.⁶

Instead of taking action, we get stuck arguing about effect sizes and causal mechanisms, and social media companies continue operating unchecked.

It’s time we changed the framing of this debate. We do not need scary proclamations and vague discussions of “mental health.” We need specific and accurate information on the potential harms of these platforms. We do not need to exaggerate. We do not need to be afraid.

We need to look at the problems in front of us, and get started on fixing them.⁷

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More on social media and mental health:

• Techno Sapiens ultimate guide to teens, phones, and mental health (start here!)

• Debates about social media and kids’ mental health are getting us nowhere

• Making sense of The Anxious Generation

• Should social media have a warning label?

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1. If you’re wondering why this is coming to you on a Tuesday (instead of Monday), it’s because we have a strong holiday observance policy here at Techno Sapiens HQ. And with three young kids, snow days now count as holidays in my house.

2. In their recent post, Haidt and Rausch distinguish between two questions about social media harms, similar to what I describe above:

(1) The historical trends question. Was the spread of social media in the early 2010s (as smartphones were widely adopted) a major contributing cause of the big increases in adolescent depression, anxiety, and self-harm that began in the U.S. and many other Western countries soon afterward? and (2) The product safety question. Is social media safe today for children and adolescents? When used in the ordinary way (which is now five hours a day), does this consumer product expose young people to unreasonable levels of risk and harm?

I absolutely agree with this distinction, and I would further distinguish (as Haidt and Rausch go on to do) between the types of “risk and harm” we’re looking at in question #2. I think it’s worth separating out whether we believe something is harming adolescents’ mental health (however we define it), versus whether it’s judged to be problematic in some other way (i.e., dangerous to physical safety, distressing to them in the moment, simply developmentally appropriate, etc.)

3. Thank you to Haidt and his team for compiling Meta’s internal research into a handy (aptly named!) website called MetasInternalResearch.org, from which some of the data I cited above was taken.

4. Worth noting here that when teenagers sign up for social media platforms, they’re required to accept the platforms’ user agreements…which are, essentially, legal contracts. A thing that, outside of the digital world, we generally do not allow minors to do.

5. We run into a similar issue with the word “addiction.” Addiction has a specific meaning and diagnostic criteria in the psychology world, but it’s also a word we throw around when we simply mean that something is hard to stop doing. It’s also (I believe) very difficult to prove that social media is causing “addiction”—but not at all difficult to prove that many kids feel they’re spending too much time on it.

6. The whole concept of warning teens that social media is bad for their mental health strikes me as ineffective. If you give a child unrestricted access to a platform that is designed to be hard to stop using, and that they and all their friends are using for hours everyday, and then you tell them “this is bad for your mental bad”—what happens? Most likely, they come to believe it is bad for their mental health, but feel stuck using it anyway, and we create a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. If we really think it is bad for them, we should not be putting the onus on them to stop using it. We do not go around warning 13 year olds never to open a bank account because it’s BAD for their MENTAL HEALTH. We just..don’t let them do it.

7. I know this post is a little too long, but in my defense: (1) It started out 10 single-spaced pages, so getting here was a small miracle, and (2) I have a lot of opinions. I ended up cutting some big topics—social media bans, the balance of risks and benefits for kids, how the platforms have changed over time—to save space. The good news, though, is that if you’re interested in hearing more about these topics (and any others you’re curious about), you can join our Coffee Chat for paying subscribers on February 5!