The mistake we're making on teens and social media

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7 min read

This week, and 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 ...