Governments push to ban teenage social media, but behind the scenes a messy battle for science

As governments around the world try to curb teenagers access to smartphones and social networksand heated scientific debate debate has erupted over whether these digital technologies are actually harming young people’s mental health.

Dispute caused a recent influential book blaming phones for rising youth anxiety has revealed deep uncertainties in the research evidence – even as politicians from Arkansas to Australia move forward with broad prohibitions and restrictions.

Chronology of the dispute

In March, New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published a popular science book titled Anxious generation. This explains the rise in youth mental illness over the past 15 years or so due to the advent of smartphones and social media.

One is early a review of Haidt’s book psychologist Candice Odgers of Duke University, published in the journal Nature, expressed a common criticism among expert readers: although social media sometimes associated with bad results, we don’t know if it reasons these poor results.

In April Haidt answered that some recent experimental studies in which researchers encourage people to reduce their use of social media show benefits.

In May, Stetson University psychologist Christopher Ferguson published “meta-analysis” of dozens of social media experiments and found that overall, reducing social media use had no effect on mental health.

The following August, Haidt and colleague Zach Rausch published a blog post arguing Ferguson’s methods were flawed. They said that doing the meta-analysis in a different way shows that social media does have an effect on mental health.

Soon after, one of us (Matthew B. Jahn) posted own blog postpointing out problems in Ferguson’s original meta-analysis, but showing Haidt and Rausch’s reanalysis, also defective. This post also makes a good case for a re-analysis of Ferguson’s meta-analysis still does not provide any conclusive evidence of the effects of social media on mental health.

In response to Jane, Haidt and Rausch revised their own post. In September and October, the village returned two further postspointing out more serious errors in Ferguson’s work.

Yane agreed with the mistakes Haidt and Rausch found and decided to reconstruct Ferguson’s database (and analyses) from scratch.

Discussions and further work are still ongoing. Another team recently published an analysis (as a preprint that has not been independently peer-reviewed) disagreeing with Ferguson, using the same unreliable methods as Haidt and Rausch’s first blog post.

The evidence is varied but not very conclusive

Why so much debate? This is partly because experiments in which researchers force people to reduce their use of social media have mixed results. Some show benefit, some harm, and some have no effect.

But the bigger problem, in our view, is that the evidence from these experimental studies is not very good.

One of the experiments Research included in Ferguson’s meta-analysis found that some German Facebook users reduced their use of the social media platform for two weeks, while others continued to use it as usual. The participants then had to self-report their mental health and life satisfaction.

People who were asked to use Facebook less reported spending less time on the platform. However, no significant effect was found on depression, smoking behavior, or life satisfaction at any time point between the two groups. There was a difference in self-reported physical activity, but it was very small.

another known research recruited 143 undergraduate students and then randomly assigned them to either limit their use of Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram to ten minutes a day for a month or to make no changes. The researchers then asked participants to report their anxiety, depression, self-esteem, autonomy, loneliness, fear of losing something, and social support.

At the end of the month, there was no difference between the two groups on most measures of mental health and well-being. Those who reduced their social media use showed a small decrease in loneliness, and there was a small improvement in depression scores among people who reported high levels of depression.

Existing social media experiments can’t answer the big questions

Similar studies concern narrow specific issues. They simply cannot answer the important question of whether long-term reductions in social media use benefit mental health.

On the one hand, they look at specific platforms rather than overall social media usage. On the other hand, most experiments don’t really define “social media.” Facebook is obviously a social network, but what about messaging services like WhatsApp or even Nintendo’s online gaming platform?

Furthermore, few of these studies include interventions or outcomes that can be objectively measured. They involve asking people – often students – to reduce their use of social media and then asking them how they feel. This creates a number of obvious biases, not least because people may feel differently about whether they have been asked to change their lives or not.

In a medical study that evaluates the effect of a drug on mental health, a placebo is usually prescribed – a substitute that should not have any biological effect on the participant. Placebos are a powerful means of mitigating bias because they ensure that the participant does not know whether they actually received the drug or not.

For research on reducing the number of social networks, a placebo is practically impossible. You can’t make a member think they’re cutting back on social media when they’re not.

Individual changes and social problem

Moreover, all these studies work at the level of changes in the behavior of the individual. But social media is fundamentally social. If one college class uses Instagram less, it may not affect their mental health even if Instagram is badbecause everyone around is still using the platform like never before.

Finally, none of the studies looked at adolescents. Currently, there is simply no reliable evidence that encouraging teenagers to use less social media affects their mental health.

Which brings us back to the fundamental question. Does cutting back on social media improve adolescent mental health? With the available evidence, we don’t think there’s any way to know.