As I wrote a few weeks ago in a previous edition of Torment Nexus, the Australian law banning kids under 16 from using social media is the first of its kind, but it is unlikely to be the last. The French parliament just voted to pass a similar law, and Malaysia’s new law went into effect January 1, and the communications minister said the government is looking to Australia for guidance on implementing it. Denmark is also moving toward a ban for users under 15, with parental consent allowed from age 13, and Norway is raising the minimum age from to 15. The EU recently voted by an overwhelming majority to set an minimum age of 16 for social media, video-sharing platforms, and AI companions, and France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, and Greece are all testing a European age-verification app that could power such bans. These laws are being driven by concern that social-media use is responsible for an increase in rates of teen depression, anxiety and other mental-health related issues. But is there any proof that this is the case? In a word, no.
As I noted in an earlier post on this topic — which I think approaches the level of a moral panic — the conventional wisdom is diametrically opposed to the vast majority of research on social media and teen depression and anxiety. One of the main reasons why people probably believe it causes harm is a seemingly never-ending stream of news articles claiming this to be the case. “Smartphones and social media are destroying children’s mental health,” the Financial Times wrote, while the Guardian described the smartphone as “a pocket full of poison.” Many of these articles are based on books such as The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the Stern School of Business, which talks about how smartphone use and social media have caused an epidemic of anxiety among young people. Haidt provides research that he says backs up his case, but virtually every other study that has been done on this topic disagrees.
That list of contrarian takes includes two major new studies, one done by psychologists in Australia, and another done by researchers at Manchester in the UK. In the first, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s Pediatrics journal, reseachers studied over 100,000 Australian teens (grades 4-12) for 3 years. Interestingly enough, they say their results show that the best possible outcome for a self-reported sense of well-being was moderate use of social media. Heavy use of social media was correlated with a lower sense of well-being, but so was no social media use at all. For teen boys, the outcome of no social-media use at all “became increasingly problematic from midadolescence, exceeding risks of high use by late adolescence.”
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The second study, by researchers at the University of Manchester in the UK, was published in the Journal of Public Health. It looked at the effects of both social media and time spent gaming, either online or on a console. The conclusion: There was no evidence that time spent on social media or gaming frequency predicted later internalizing symptoms among girls or boys. As the researchers put it in their summary: “The findings of this study do not support the widely held view that adolescent technology use is a major causal factor in their mental-health difficulties.” Here’s how the study’s authors described their work in a separate piece they published at The Conversation:
Neither active nor passive social media use was a significant driver of later mental health problems in our sample. If the evidence is so weak, why is the concern so strong? Part of the issue is a reliance on simple correlations. If you find that anxious or depressed teens use more social media, it is easy to assume the social media caused their difficulties. But it is just as likely that the mental health problems came first, or that a third factor, such as school stress or family difficulties, is driving both. Our findings suggest that limiting the hours spent on consoles and apps or measures such as banning social media for under 16s is unlikely to have an effect on teenagers’ mental health in the long term. Policymakers should take note. Worse, such blanket bans may obscure the real risk factors by offering a simple solution to a complex problem.
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Not to pat myself on the back too much, but the researchers’ conclusion in that Conversation piece is almost identical to what I wrote in one of my previous Torment Nexus pieces on the topic — not just the part about correlation not being the same as causation (in other words, the depression or anxiety might cause the increased social media use instead of the other way around) but also the conclusion that even well-meaning legislation could wind up making things worse for many teens. As I put it, laws like Australia’s are “a blunt instrument that likely won’t do much to help the problems we are concerned about. Instead of pinning all of the anxiety and depression and suicidal impulses that a teen might feel on Twitter or TikTok, perhaps it would be better to look at the world around them, and see what changes would make more of a difference.” Candice Odgers, a veteran psychologist and one of Haidt’s biggest critics, makes a similar point.
I should note that not everyone is convinced by the Manchester study in particular. Casey Newton, who writes the Platformer newsletter (which I highly recommend) took issue with the study in a recent edition, saying it has “some important limitations,” including the fact that there was a 12-month gap between measurement of teen well-being and some harms from social media “may not be detectable in a survey that a teenager takes once a year.” I’m not as concerned as Casey about this detail, since I think serious mental health problems would still be obvious, but it’s a fair point. He also noted that while the study distinguished between active and passive use of social media (posting vs. scrolling) and found no significant difference, this might not be enough to capture experiences such as pro-anorexia content, cyber-bullying, adult sexual-abuse grooming, etc. Also a fair point, although I would note that virtually none of the research has been done at this level of granularity (and I’m open to the idea that it should be).
Casey adds that he believes the researchers when they suggest that banning social media for under-16s as Australia has will not instantly improve the median teen’s mental health. However, he says, blanket social-media or smartphone bans do offer a simple solution to any number of ongoing problems on these platforms, including “the ease with which they connect predators to children; addictive mechanics like ‘streaks’ and notifications that roil classrooms and wreck sleep; predictive algorithms that introduce young girls to disordered eating and related harms; and the unsettled feeling that comes from staring way too long at a feed you had only intended to look at for a minute.” These are also clearly bad, and yet I am still troubled by blanket bans. There are harms related to internet use in general, but we don’t ban children or adults because there are also benefits.
To be fair, the UK researchers did agree that there were potential harms from social media that don’t really have anything to do with the amount of time spent on it, including bullying and extreme content. As The Guardian described it: “The authors stressed that the findings did not mean online experiences were harmless. Hurtful messages, online pressures and extreme content could have detrimental effects on wellbeing, but focusing on screen time alone was not helpful, they said.” Not only that, but as Newton notes in his piece, there are significant sub-groups of teens — those who are LGBTQ, for example, or struggling with their sexuality — for whom a blanket ban could actually cause more mental-health challenges and harm. If social media is one of the ways in which you connect with other people who share your worldview or have experience with the kinds of issues you are struggling with, is it fair to force you not to use it? As two members of Australia’s human rights commission put it in a letter opposing the new law:
For children in marginalised, remote, or vulnerable situations, social media offers a lifeline. It connects children with disability to peers, resources, and communities they may not otherwise access. It helps LGBTQIA+ youth find acceptance and solidarity. It can improve access to healthcare, particularly for children seeking mental health support. These digital spaces can educate, inform, and remind kids who feel isolated — whether physically or emotionally — that they are not alone. Children and young people have rights to access information and to freely express themselves as they develop and form their identities. A social media ban directly threatens these rights.
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I don’t want to belabor the point too much, but given the kind of attention that Haidt’s articles and research tend to get, I think it’s worth pointing out the sheer volume of research from widely-recognized psychologists that has found no evidence for the kinds of harms or epidemic-like conditions that Haidt claims are caused by teen social-media use. Even the evidence that he published in his most recent paper (part of the World Happiness Project) is largely circumstantial: if Snap and Facebook say they are looking at harms, then there must be harm, etc. Also, I am not trying to turn this into an ad hominem argument, but while Haidt is on staff at the Stern School of Business — which I wouldn’t associate with leading-edge psychological research — Candice Odgers is the associate dean of research and development at the School of Social Ecology at the University of California in Irvine and the co-director of the Child and Brain Development Program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. In her review of Haidt’s book, she wrote:
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.
Odgers pointed out that an analysis done in 72 countries showed no consistent or measurable associations between well-being and the roll-out of social media globally (specifically, Facebook). Also, findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, the largest long-term study of adolescent brain development in the United States, found no evidence of drastic changes associated with digital-technology use. In a more recent piece for The Atlantic, she wrote that she and others have been studying teens and mental illness, anxiety and depression and their causes for decades, and have failed to find support for the claim that digital-technology use is a major contributor to adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms. In fact, she says, a recent study and a review of research on social media and depression found social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting adolescents’ mental health.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report in 2023 that stated: “Available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.” As the Manchester researchers noted, several meta-analyses (which look at a collection of previous studies) have come to completely different conclusions: one found that increased social media use is associated with “a range of negative mental health outcomes in adolescence,” while a second published the same year found that “there is no evidence that time spent on social media is correlated with adolescent mental health problems.” Even when there is a correlation, the UK researcher say, reported effect sizes are often “modest.”
Haidt often cites research by Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State, to support his claims of a causal link between smartphone use and anxiety in teens. But in a study published in Nature, Przybylski tried to reproduce some of her findings and was unable to show more than a mild correlation. In fact, the average correlation between screen time and well-being “was analogous to the correlation between wearing glasses and well being,” and therefore might just be a rounding error or statistical anomaly. A meta-analysis of 226 studies in 2022 involving more than a quarter of a million participants found that the association between social media and feelings of well-being was “indistinguishable from zero.” Is this the kind of smoking gun that should be driving governments to ban teens from using social media? I would argue it is not, but no one has asked me for my opinion on the matter. So I am sharing it with you instead 🙂
Haidt at OSF: a chapter in the 2026 World Happiness Report titled “Social Media Is Harming Young People at a Scale Large Enough to Cause Changes at the Population Level.” Is social media use reasonably safe for children and adolescents? We call this the
“product safety question,” and we present seven lines of evidence showing that the
answer is no. The evidence of harm is found in: 1) surveys of young people; 2) surveys
of parents, teachers, and clinicians; 3) contents from corporate documents; 4) findings
from cross-sectional studies; 5) findings from longitudinal studies; 6) findings from social
media reduction experiments; and 7) findings from natural experiments. We show that
there is now overwhelming evidence of severe and widespread direct harms (such as
cyberbullying and sextortion), and compelling evidence of troubling indirect harms (such
as depression). Furthermore, we show that the harms and risks to individual users are
so diverse and vast in scope that they justify the view that social media is causing harm
at a population level. We further argue that when these lines of evidence are considered
alongside the timing, scope, and cross-national trends in adolescent well-being and
mental health, they can help answer a second question: Was the rapid adoption of
always-available social media by adolescents in the early 2010s a substantial
contributor to the population-level increases in mental illness that emerged by the mid
2010s in many Western nations? We call this the “historical trends question.” We draw
on our findings about the vast scale of harm uncovered while answering the product
safety question to argue that the answer to the historical trends question is “yes.”
Haidt blog post: In the last few years, however, a flood of new research has altered the landscape of the debate, in two ways. First, there is now a lot more work revealing a wide range of direct harms caused by social media that extends beyond mental health (e.g., cyberbullying, sextortion, and exposure to algorithmically amplified content promoting suicide, eating-disorders, and self-harm). These direct harms are not correlations; they are harms reported by millions of young people each year. Second, recent research — including experiments conducted by Meta itself — provides increasingly strong causal evidence linking heavy social media use to depression, anxiety, and other internalizing disorders. (We refer to these as indirect harms because they appear over time rather than right away).
APA Psychnet: There is no evidence that time spent on social media is correlated with adolescent mental health problems: Findings from a meta-analysis; The issue of whether social media use does or does not influence youth internalizing mental health disorders (e.g., anxiety, depression) remains a pressing concern for policymakers, parents, and psychologists. Widespread claims suggest potentially harmful effects of social media use on youth. This was investigated in a meta-analysis of 46 studies of youth social media use and mental health. Results indicated that the current pool of research is unable to support claims of harmful effects for social media use on youth internalizing disorders. Some types of methodological weaknesses, such as evident demand characteristics and lack of preregistration, remain common in this area. It is recommended that caution is issued when attributing mental health harm to social media use as the current evidence cannot support this.
Current Opinion in Psychology: Social media use and its impact on adolescent mental health: An umbrella review of the evidence; We fill this gap with an up-to-date umbrella review, a review of reviews published between 2019 and mid-2021. Our search yielded 25 reviews: seven meta-analyses, nine systematic, and nine narrative reviews. Results showed that most reviews interpreted the associations between social media use and mental health as ‘weak’ or ‘inconsistent,’ whereas a few qualified the same associations as ‘substantial’ and ‘deleterious.’ five meta-analyses yielded associations of general use of social network sites (SNS use) with higher levels of adolescent ill-being that ranged from very small to moderate (r = .05 to r = .17) [14,17, 18, 19, 20], and one did not find such an association (r = .02 ns, 15). As for well-being, one meta-analysis found that SNS use was weakly associated with higher levels of well-being (r = +.05) [19], whereas another found that it was weakly related to lower levels of well-being.
In all, the available meta-analytic evidence suggests that SNS use is weakly associated with higher levels of ill-being [14,17, 18, 19, 20] but also with higher levels of well-being [17,19], a result that suggests that ill-being is not simply the flip-side of well-being and vice versa, and that both outcomes should be investigated in their own right [11,39]. Finally, all meta-analyses reported considerable variability in the reported associations. 21 out of the 25 reviews agreed that the evidence on which their conclusions are based is primarily cross-sectional so that causal conclusions are not warranted.
National Academies: The science suggests that some features of social media function can harm some young people’s mental health. These include, but are not limited to, algorithmically driven distortions of reality exacerbating harmful content and disinformation, the distraction away from time that can otherwise be used in more healthy ways, and the creation of opportunities where youth can be abused or exploited. However, there are also several ways in which social media improve the lives of youth, including the creation of opportunities for community among more marginalized youth, and the opportunity for fun and joy for the vast majority of users. This balance lies at the heart of the relation between social media and mental health. While some users, using social media in particular ways, may have their mental health adversely affected, for many others there will be no such harm, and for others still the experience will be helpful. This suggested to the committee a judicious approach to protect youth mental health is warranted rather than some of the more broad-stroke bans that have been proposed by other entities in recent years.
Meta-analyses linking social media to various measures of health and well-being generally report small effects and weak associations, drawn from mainly cross-sectional studies. There is ample room for both positive and negative experiences to be obscured in such analyses. It is possible that the small associations reported may be influenced by a balance of good and bad experiences. That the use of social media, like many things in life, may be a constantly shifting calculus of the risky, the beneficial, and the mundane.
The balance between the social, educational, and entertainment value young people find online could be compared to other socially uniting pastimes. It is reasonable to point out that we rarely pathologize teenagers who enjoy watching sports. Yet a societal shift wherein all young people were suddenly watching sports all the time, late at night, to the neglect of other activities, would give us pause. The committee recognizes that social media is associated with harm among some adolescents. If the aggregate experience of social media were harmful to neutral, then restrictive actions would be justified in the interest of protecting the most vulnerable. Yet the reality is more complicated.
Social media has the potential to connect friends and family. It may also be valuable to teens who otherwise feel excluded or lack offline support. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, questioning, and other (LGBTQ+) teenagers may find support online that they do not have in their offline world, as do young people coping with serious illness, bereavement, and mental health problems. The committee’s review of the literature did not support the conclusion that social media causes changes in adolescent health at the population level. Nevertheless, there are potential harms associated with the platforms such as the ability to encourage unhealthy social comparisons, especially for teens who are inclined to view others as somehow better off than themselves. Social comparison may play a role in some teens body image problems and has been proposed as a risk factor for eating disorders.
Social media use can also displace time that could otherwise be given to sleep, exercise, studying, or other hobbies. A serious consequence in its own right, sleep loss is also a risk factor for depression, mood disturbances, injuries, attention problems, and excessive weight gain. Yet the extent to which social media use displaces unambiguously healthy pastimes such as sport and sleep appears to vary across socioeconomic backgrounds. Combined with evidence that young people from the highest income families tend to limit their use of social media, there is reason to suspect that social and economic factors confound many of the risks attributed to the displacing power of social media.
American Psychological Association: Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people. Adolescents’ lives online both reflect and impact their offline lives. In most cases, the effects of social media are dependent on adolescents’ own personal and psychological characteristics and social circumstances—intersecting with the specific content, features, or functions that are afforded within many social media platforms. In other words, the effects of social media likely depend on what teens can do and see online, teens’ preexisting strengths or vulnerabilities, and the contexts in which they grow up.
Oxford: The largest independent scientific study ever conducted, investigating the spread of Facebook across the globe found no evidence that the social media platform’s worldwide penetration is linked to widespread psychological harm. The independent Oxford study used well-being data from nearly a million people across 72 countries over 12 years and harnessed actual individual usage data from millions of Facebook users worldwide to investigate the impact of Facebook on well-being. Despite popular claims about the impact of social media on well-being, the Oxford Internet Institute research, led by Professor Andrew Przybylski and Professor Matti Vuorre, found ‘no evidence’ Facebook’s spread was consistently linked negatively to well-being – quite the opposite.
The research paper states, ‘Although reports of negative psychological outcomes associated with social media are common in academic and popular writing, evidence for harms is, on balance, more speculative than conclusive.’ Professor Przybylski explains, “We examined the best available data carefully – and found they did not support the idea that Facebook membership is related to harm, quite the opposite. In fact, our analysis indicates Facebook is possibly related to positive well-being”. Facebook was involved in the research, but only to provide data and did not commission or fund the study. Researchers from Facebook helped ensure the data was accurate, but did not influence the design of the study or know the findings before the Oxford team made the results public.
Techdirt Jan 2026: Kids who are already struggling, and who aren’t getting the support they need, might use social media differently—not the other way around. This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who has been paying attention. We’ve covered study after study showing that the relationship between social media and teen mental health is complicated, context-dependent, and nowhere near as clear-cut as Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation” would have you believe. As we’ve noted before, correlation is not causation, and the timing of teen mental health declines doesn’t actually line up neatly with smartphone adoption the way the narrative claims. But “Social Media Is Complicated And The Effects Depend On How You Use It, Your Age, Your Sex, And A Bunch Of Other Factors” doesn’t quite have the same ring as “Smartphones Destroyed A Generation.”
Techdirt 2023: Last fall, the widely respected Pew Research Center did a massive study on kids and the internet, and found that for a majority of teens, social media was way more helpful than harmful. This past May, the American Psychological Association (which has fallen for tech moral panics in the past, such as with video games) released a huge, incredibly detailed and nuanced report going through all of the evidence, and finding no causal link between social media and harms to teens. Soon after that, the US Surgeon General came out with a report which was misrepresented widely in the press. Yet, the details of that report also showed that no causal link could be found between social media and harms to teens. It did still recommend that we act as if there were a link, which was weird and explains the media coverage, but the actual report highlights no causal link, while also pointing out how much benefit teens receive from social media.
A few months later, an Oxford University study came out covering nearly a million people across 72 countries, noting that it could find no evidence of social media leading to psychological harm. The Journal of Pediatrics recently published a new study again noting that after looking through decades of research, the mental health epidemic faced among young people appears largely due to the lack of open spaces where kids can be kids without parents hovering over them. That report notes that they explored the idea that social media was a part of the problem, but could find no data to support that claim. In November a new study came out from Oxford showing no evidence whatsoever of increased screentime having any impact on the functioning of brain development in kids.
Techdirt: lots of people rely on the reporting around the Frances Haugen leaks from inside Facebook to argue that “Facebook knew” that Instagram causes “body image issues” for children (and then most people leapt to the belief that the company then ignored and downplayed that finding). But, as we noted, the actual study told a very, very different story. As we pointed out at the time, the study was an attempt to do the right thing and understand if social media like Facebook was actually causing negative self-images among teenagers, and the study found that for the most part, the answer was absolutely not. It looked at 12 different potential issues, and surveyed teenaged boys and girls, and found that in 23 out of 24 categories, social media had little to no negative impact, and quite frequently a mostly positive impact. The only issue where the “negative impact” outweighed the “positive impact” was on “body image issues” for teenaged girls, and even then it was less than one-third of the teen girls who said that it made it worse for them.