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Social Media and Mental Health: Benefits, Risks and Opportunities for Research and Practice

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Social Media and Mental Health: Benefits, Risks and Opportunities for Research and Practice

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A peer-reviewed article examining the complex relationship between social media use and mental health outcomes.

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Jon D. Elhai, Jason C. Levine, Robert D. Dvorak

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Problematic smartphone use: A conceptual overview and systematic review of relations with anxiety and depression psychopathology - PubMed

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We discuss causal explanations for relationships between problem smartphone use and psychopathology.

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The Impact of Social Media on Student Academic Performance

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The Impact of Social Media on Student Academic Performance

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A comprehensive review of research studying how social media affects academic achievement and learning outcomes in higher education.

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Screen Time and the Brain: Lessons from a Decade of Neuroimage Research

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Screen Time and the Brain: Lessons from a Decade of Neuroimage Research

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Recent research on how screen time affects brain development, cognitive function, and learning capabilities.

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Whether we like it or not, digital devices are everywhere. Some of us can barely put them down, even when we're with cherished family and friends. While these devices can enhance learning and build community, they can also interfere with everything from sleep to creativity.

Pediatrician Michael Rich, wants to understand how-and help children and parents manage their online behavior in this ever-changing digital landscape.

"It's not how long we're using screens that really matters; it's how we're using them and what's happening in our brains in response," says Rich, director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Boston Children's Hospital, associate professor of pediatrics at HMS, and associate professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The growing human brain is constantly building neural connections while pruning away less-used ones, and digital media use plays an active role in that process, according to Rich. Much of what happens on screen provides "impoverished" stimulation of the developing brain compared to reality, he says. Children need a diverse menu of online and offline experiences, including the chance to let their minds wander.

"Boredom is the space in which creativity and imagination happen," he says.

A good night's sleep is also key to brain development, and HMS researchers have shown that using blue light-emitting screen devices like smartphones before bedtime can disrupt sleep patterns by suppressing secretion of the hormone melatonin.

Many teens who stay up late texting are not only getting less shut-eye, they're also lacking the deep REM sleep essential for processing and storing information from that day into memory.

"So even if they stay awake in algebra class," Rich says, "they may not remember what happened in class yesterday."

The center's Clinic for Interactive Media and Internet Disorders treats young people whose excessive gaming, social media, and other online activities are affecting their health and daily lives at home and school.

Rich says these seductive digital pursuits appear to activate the brain's reward system.

"Virtually all games and social media work on what's called a variable reward system, which is exactly what you get when you go to Mohegan Sun and pull a lever on a slot machine. It balances the hope that you're going to make it big with a little bit of frustration, and unlike the slot machine, a sense of skill needed to improve."

A young person's brain lacks a fully developed self-control system to help them with stopping this kind of obsessive behavior.

The experience of growing up today, as youth move seamlessly between online and offline environments, is the focus of an international research project that Rich is leading.

The Growing Up Digital (GUD) Study is now underway in Canada, with plans to expand to Australia, Finland, and eventually all six populated continents in partnership with the nonprofit Sesame Workshop. The investigators plan to follow 3,000 to 5,000 youths over 10 years, examining the impact of digital technology on their physical, mental, and social well-being.

Because this technology is evolving so rapidly, findings from the Global GUD participatory research will be released in an ongoing way so that health and educational professionals, parents, and youth can implement positive changes in real time.

In the meantime, Rich urges a balanced approach to screen use.

"We have to be flexible enough to evolve with the technology but choose how to use it right. Fire was a great discovery to cook our food, but we had to learn it could hurt and kill as well," he says.

"We don't want to be in a moral panic because kids are staring at smartphones. We need to be asking, what's happening when they're staring at their smartphone in terms of their cognitive, social, and emotional development? As with most things, it will probably be a mix of positive and negative. Going forward with our eyes open, how can we enhance the positive and mitigate the negative?"

Digital Media Tips
From pediatrician and former filmmaker Dr. Michael Rich, aka "The Mediatrician"®

Beware of digital media distraction. Half of all kids and three-quarters of parents feel the other is distracted when talking to each other.

Have regular sit-downs, screen-free meals with your children.

Put down your device. Be present with others. Observe the world around you. Let your mind wander.

Avoid blue light-emitting screen use before bedtime.

Play online games with your children rather than forbidding them. Learn how to play from them and, as you play, help them think about what they're seeing and doing on screen.

Help your children plan how to spend their time, focusing on important and favorite activities to avoid sliding into the screen abyss.

Image: iStock/Sisoje

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Whether we like it or not, digital devices are everywhere. Some of us can barely put them down, even when we're with cherished family and friends. While these devices can enhance learning and build community, they can also interfere with everything from sleep to creativity.

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Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice

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Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice

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An exploration of how traditional rhetorical concepts apply to digital communication and social media discourse.

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JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources.

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Addiction to Technology is Ruining Lives - Simon Sinek on Inside Quest

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Your phone is trying to control your life

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U.S. Senators Grilled Social Media CEOs. Will Anything Change?

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Podcast Episode · Your Undivided Attention · 02/13/2024 · 25m

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The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt with Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Technology

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Despite Australia's strict social media ban for minors, a YouTube exemption poses risks

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Despite Australia's strict social media ban for minors, a YouTube exemption poses risks

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Australian social media ban on under-16s approved by Senate

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The ban aims to reduce “harms” on children and will take at least a year to implement, the PM says.

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Why we shouldn’t ban kids from social media

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Laws in Australia, Florida, and elsewhere could end up backfiring.

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More than a dozen states sue TikTok, alleging it harms kids and is designed to addict them

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Lawsuits filed by 14 attorneys general argue that TikTok knowingly exacerbates the youth mental health crisis and places profits over child safety.

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Instagram Is Doing Grave Harm to Our Generation. We Need Help to Stop It

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"As two members of Generation Z, no one we know is doing well mentally, but you wouldn't be able to tell from their Instagram posts," write Destinee Adams and Zamaan Qureshi.

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TikTok sued for ‘wreaking havoc’ on teen mental health

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A bipartisan group of 14 attorneys general accuse the company of using addictive features to hook children.

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On Monday, four days before a Senate Commerce Committee hearing called "Protecting Kids Online: Facebook, Instagram and Mental Health Harms," Facebook announced that it was pausing development of a new product-an Instagram app aimed at children aged between ten and twelve. (Facebook currently restricts its products to users thirteen and older.) called the company's decision "to halt the app's development . . . a rare reversal for Facebook," but, according to Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, Facebook isn't abandoning the app but working to make it more acceptable to parents and policymakers, and to "demonstrate the value and importance of this project for younger teens online today." Critics see the move as an effort to appease members of Congress in order to stave off meaningful regulation.

Instagram, Facebook's popular photo-sharing app, which the company acquired in 2012, for a billion dollars, to shore up its presence on mobile devices, is now valued at around a hundred billion dollars and is central to the company's continued growth. Yet parents and child-development experts, among others, have long argued that the app, which presents a curated, Photoshopped version of reality, is harmful to young people's self-esteem, confidence, and over-all mental health. A young person told researchers from the U.K.'s Royal Society for Public Health, for a report published in 2017, "Instagram easily makes girls and women feel as if their bodies aren't good enough as people add filters and edit their pictures in order for them to look 'perfect.' " Another user reported that "Bullying on Instagram has led me to attempt suicide and also self-harm. Both caused me to experience depressive episodes and anxiety." According to the Wall Street Journal, more than forty per cent of Instagram users are younger than twenty-three.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, of Connecticut, the chair of the subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security, and his Republican colleague Senator Marsha Blackburn, of Tennessee, are convening Thursday's hearing. In August, they asked Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's C.E.O., to release the company's internal research on the mental-health effects of its platforms on young people. Facebook has been conducting such research for several years through online surveys, focus groups, and large-scale surveys, but the company refused the senators' request. (A Facebook spokesperson said that the research is proprietary and intended "to promote frank and open dialogue" inside the company.) A few weeks later, some of those studies were included in a cache of internal Facebook documents that were leaked to the Wall Street Journal and published as part of a series of articles called " The Facebook Files," written by a team of reporters led by Jeff Horwitz. As reported by the Journal, the documents show that the company is fully aware that Instagram has deleterious effects on teens. A PowerPoint slide created by Facebook researchers in 2019, for example, states that Instagram makes body-image issues worse for one in three teen-age girls. Another research presentation, from March, 2020, which was published on Facebook's internal message board and was viewed by the reporters, noted that "thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse." Teens also told Facebook's researchers that the app contributed to their depression and anxiety, a complaint that a company document from 2019 noted "was unprompted and consistent across all groups." Young Instagram users also indicated that they felt addicted to the app and lacked the wherewithal to limit their use of it.

In a post on Facebook's blog responding to the Journal, Pratiti Raychoudhury, the company's head of research, wrote that the body-image statistic cited was misleading as presented, and that other research shows that Instagram is, in fact, helpful for teens. Zuckerberg made a similar claim during a congressional hearing earlier this year, saying that the app could help kids "stay connected," and there is evidence that, during the pandemic lockdown, young people did benefit from turning to social media to blunt their isolation. Even so, as Blumenthal told the Journal's reporters, "Facebook seems to be taking a page from the textbook of Big Tobacco-targeting teens with potentially dangerous products while masking the science." He and Blackburn scheduled the hearing shortly after the Journal articles were published. Antigone Davis, Facebook's global head of safety, is slated to testify.

By any measure, even for a company that spends nearly twenty million dollars a year lobbying lawmakers, "The Facebook Files" should be calamitous. The series also reports that a little-known Facebook program called "XCheck" or "cross check," which exempts from the company's content restrictions high-profile accounts of celebrities, politicians, influencers, and those who might pose a public-relations problem if their posts were taken down, had grown to include close to six million users by 2020. In June, according to the Journal, the company told its Oversight Board that XCheck was only used in "a small number" of content-related decisions. (A spokesperson for the company said that Facebook had made "significant progress in addressing the challenges in the program.") The series additionally reports that, despite efforts at mitigation, Facebook employees flagged some drug cartels and human traffickers that still operate openly on both Facebook and Instagram, and that Facebook continues to propagate misinformation and disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines. (On Tuesday, the Times reported that Facebook groups promoting the use of the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin to treat COVID are still generating thousands of interactions every day.) And the series further reports that the company may sometimes enable repressive regimes in fast-growing emerging markets to silence its critics for fear of losing access to those markets. In particular, the company curtailed "access to dissident political content deemed illegal in exchange for the Vietnamese government ending its practice of slowing Facebook's local servers." The reporters note that, according to a former Facebook employee who worked in Asia, the company acceded to this practice "because Vietnam is a fast-growing advertising market." (Nick Clegg, the company's vice-president of global affairs, wrote that the Journal articles "have contained deliberate mischaracterizations of what we are trying to do, and conferred egregiously false motives to Facebook's leadership and employees.")

In a crucial way, though, Facebook's accommodation of foreign political leaders is comparable to its plan to create an Instagram app for kids. Facebook executives prioritize growth, and so they need to find new markets, both geographic-Vietnam, for instance-and demographic, such as children under thirteen. In the latest installment of "The Facebook Files," published on Tuesday, Horwitz and Georgia Wells write that "the company formed a team to study preteens, set a three-year goal to create more products for them, and commissioned strategy papers about the long-term business opportunities presented by these potential users. In one presentation, it wondered whether there might be a way to engage children during play dates. 'Why do we care about tweens?' said one document from 2020. 'They are a valuable but untapped audience.' " (The same day, the company said this research was commissioned to create "safer and age-appropriate options for children.")

When Senators Blumenthal and Blackburn announced Thursday's hearing, they said that the committee would "use every resource at our disposal to investigate what Facebook knew and when they knew it-including seeking further documents and pursuing witness testimony." On Tuesday, they confirmed that a whistle-blower who has been aiding the committee's investigation will testify in Congress on October 5th. It does not help the company that, as Politico reported last week, on August 6th, two groups of Facebook shareholders filed amended complaints against Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and other Facebook board members. (The shareholders originally filed suit in 2020, and the new filings include information from documents that they acquired as a result.) Among many claims, one of the suits alleges that the five-billion-dollar fine that the Federal Trade Commission levied against Facebook in 2019, for its role in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, was, in effect, an overpayment-a quid pro quo to insure that Zuckerberg would not be held personally liable. Five billion dollars is the largest fine ever imposed by the F.T.C. for violating consumer privacy. (At the time of the original filing, a Facebook spokesperson said that the lawsuit was without merit; the company declined to comment this week.)

On Monday, a few hours after Facebook announced that it was pausing work on the Instagram app for kids, Blumenthal and three other Democratic representatives, including Senator Ed Markey, of Massachusetts, called on the company to "completely abandon this project." This was a plea, not a proviso, because, so far, supplication is the only expedient available to them. But perhaps Congress will move beyond the usual performative theatrics of chastising Big Tech executives in the hearing room and begin to craft robust legislation to curb social media's antisocial effects. The evidence is before it.

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Instagram for Kids and What Facebook Knows About the Effects of Social Media

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Sue Halpern writes about a Senate hearing about the effect of social media on mental health and Facebook's decision to pause development of an Instagram app for children.

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Facebook Has Known for 18 Months That Instagram Is Bad for Teens. Here Are the Documented Harms.

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There is ample research about how harmful Instagram is for teen girls, especially around body image. It turns out Facebook's own research confirms it.

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Georgia Wells, Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman

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Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show

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Its own in-depth research shows a significant teen mental-health issue that Facebook plays down in public. Part 2 in a series offering an unparalleled look inside the social-media giant's failings-and its unwillingness or inability to address them.

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PDF: Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show; Its own in-depth research shows a significant teen mental-health issue that Facebook plays down in public

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PDF: Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show; Its own in-depth research shows a significant teen mental-health issue that Facebook plays down in public

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Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show; Its own in-depth research shows a significant teen mental-health issue that Facebook plays down in public

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Instagram's Body Image Problem May Be Unfixable, Experts Say

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The features within Instagram that cause teenage girls to develop negative feelings about their body image may be baked into the very core of the platform