Social Media and Adolescent Health (2024) / Chapter Skim
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From page 1... ...
Teens' use of social media is one of the more widely cited explanations for the observed deterioration in youth mental health. Spurred by public concern of declining mental health among young people, Congress and state legislatures around the country are considering actions to curb adolescents' use of social media and to influence the companies that profit from it, adding urgency to the need for more clarity about precisely how and to what extent social media affects young people.
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In defining the scope of this report, the committee relied on a definition of social media adapted from the American Psychological Association: Social media refers to "interactive technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks." Social media can therefore include social networking, gaming, virtual worlds, video sharing sites, and blogs. In its understanding of health, the committee was influenced by the World Health Organization's (WHO's)
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From page 3... ...
Encouraging traffic to a platform is in the best interest of the social media companies in part because traffic to the site influences the value of advertising, a major source of revenue for many social media firms. The advertising revenue social media companies earn tends to track the time users' spend on their platforms.
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Questions of data privacy can quickly become entwined with larger concerns about social media affordances that encourage young people to spend excessive amounts of time on a platform. A growing interest in age-appropriate design and legal restrictions on social media use can create market confusion for social media companies that operate in different jurisdictions.
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THE RELATION BETWEEN SOCIAL MEDIA AND HEALTH At the center of any discussion of social media and adolescent health is a growing body of research attempting to measure this association and disentangle the many, sometimes conflicting, often reciprocal mechanisms through which the online experience and physical or mental health can influence each other. Most of this research examines associations between social media use and mental and behavioral outcomes; fewer studies investigate physical outcomes.
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Among LGBTQ+ teens, for example, social media use is associated with fewer depressive symptoms but an increased risk of bullying. Heavy users of online video games can develop a dysfunctional behavior related to games, characterized by a persistent pattern of impaired control over the need to play, to the point where gaming takes precedence over all other life activities.
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It is difficult to determine what effect social media has on well-being or the extent to which companies are doing due diligence to protect young people from the more habit-forming affordances of their platforms, as companies retain extremely tight control on their data and algorithms. A general lack of transparency regarding social media operations has bred public distrust of the platforms and the companies that run them.
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The creation of industry standards for social media would inform the FTC's governance by consent decree, even for social media providers that do not explicitly adopt the standard into their terms of service. TRAINING AND EDUCATION Social media has the potential to both harm and benefit young people.
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Department of Education should draw national attention to the importance of comprehensive digital media literacy and state boards of education should set standards for the same in grades K through 12. Teachers are critical players in fostering digital literacy among their students, especially in teaching them how to use technology safely and responsibly, critically evaluate online information, and create and share digital content.
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In the same way that hotel and airline companies have made prevention of human trafficking an industry-wide corporate social responsibility, so should the technology industry take steps to ensure their users can easily report online abuse and that these reports are followed up.
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A RESEARCH AGENDA Quantifying the risks and benefits social media pose to young people is difficult for many reasons. Given the challenges in measuring both exposures and outcomes, to say nothing of the variability in psychological responses to stimuli, it is hard to offer an overall summary about the relation between social media and youth mental health beyond observing that the effects, both helpful and harmful, accrue differently to different users.
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The committee commends research using randomized designs and experimental platforms to study social networks. Such research is difficult and expensive to conduct and would therefore benefit from being an explicit priority of the major government funders.
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Recommendation 8-3: Congress should pass legislation to ensure researchers can access data to examine the effects of social media on child and adolescent health. In advancing the legislation recommended, it will be important to articulate technical steps that could improve the anonymization of user data, recognizing nonetheless that complete anonymization of social media data is not always possible or entirely effective.
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