We’re in the middle of a youth Mental Health crisis in America this is the defining Public Health Challenge of our time and I’m very concerned that social media has become an important contributor to the pain and struggles,that many of our young people are facing the question that everyone wants to answer is does social media negatively impact mental health?
We have to remember that social media is not one thing it’s depending on who you’re talking to what content you’re seeing what functions,you’re interacting with the like button for instance the impact social media platforms like Facebook,Instagram and Tick Tock have on the public notably teens is unquestioned but what’s still at play is how much of that impact is negative?
We saw a bigdecrease in Teen Mental Health increase
in depression which was pretty well time locked to
when social media got really big and when it became super engaging that year or two as puberty is just
beginning is the second most important time for adolescent brain development reorganization for our entire lives and there’s a lot of growth and a lot of changes that are happening at the precise time that we’re actually handing them a device that we know makes their brain react and unexpected and dramatic
ways two things that happen to occur at the same time are not causally related to one another so we can see some mechanistic pieces and some signs but we
can’t make causal statements as scientists
in a recent CDC study from 2011 to 2021,
when social media use was booming the percentage of teen girls who reported persistent feelings of sadness or
hopelessness increased by nearly 60 percent,it’s hard to do an experiment that fully captures the effect of Facebook and all of the network effects where you know mebeing on Facebook affects my friends,it’s just really hard to study if we don’t want to wait until we have the
most conclusive proof that demonstrates with causality, what the harms will be because the time that it takes for
science to do that kind of work will lose an entire generation or two despite that sentiment a study released last month from the University of Oxford found no evidence linking individual Facebook data to a negative well-being that study however was specifically for Facebook not Instagram where the demographic tends to skew younger.
Unfortunately the state of data sharing in 2023 is worse than it was in 2022 and 2021 companies have largely sort of uh in Mass closed databases that are or and apis
that were used by academics to understand what sort of behavior was like on the platforms API or application
programming interface allows third parties to communicate with its product.