child and adolescent health

New Report Analyzes Links Between Social Media and Adolescent Health

A National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee chaired by Dean Sandro Galea has released a new report with comprehensive guidance on how to navigate the positive and negative effects of social media, such as new industry standards for platform design, transparence, and data use.

A National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee examining connections between social media and adolescent health has issued a varied and substantive slate of recommendations to help navigate the positive and negative effects of a ubiquitous part of 21st century teenage life.

The committee, chaired by School of Public Health Dean Sandro Galea, issued a highly-anticipated report of its findings on December 13 that advises social media companies to develop industry standards for platform design, transparence, and data use—all with the goal of promoting better mental health among young users. The cross-disciplinary panel from an array of academic fields also recommends increased engagement of educators and health care providers to both highlight the benefits and minimize harms of social media use and called for multiple measures to protect youth from online abuse.

Victor Dzau, president of the National Academy of Medicine and chancellor emeritus and James B. Duke Professor of Medicine at Duke University, explained the main impetus behind the committee’s work: “Nations observed an alarming uptick of reports of depression, anxiety, and even suicide among young people over the last 20 years. When we see these trends lines moving together, one wonders if the relationship is more than coincidental. So a concern with this relationship between social media and mental health among young people has been the center of considerable public discussion, academic studies and even legislative interests. State legislatures all over the country are considering different strategies to curtail or alter social media use, as are different countries in their national laws.”

In the US, 95 percent of teens have a smartphone and nearly all of them access the internet daily, Dean Galea said. Encouraging digital literacy in kindergarten through high school is among the recommendations that could have immediate effect on children and their use of social media. “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,” the report states, while acknowledging the need for continuing education for teachers to enable them to stay informed about changes in technology.

In addition to its initial recommendations, the committee also advises that interested parties “double down” on research that can provide more clarity about the connections between of social media and mental health. More research may help narrow down the “more specific actions that can mitigate the harms, and accentuate the positives, of social media,” the report says.

Dean Galea added an important caveat to the report’s findings that explained why the committee focused solely on the science surrounding the issue. “The committee was very much informed by the idea that we’re looking at adolescents, and adolescence is a time of critical, physical, emotional, cognitive and social change. That means that thinking carefully about the intersection of adolescents with exposures, be it social media, be it anything else, is particularly important, ” Galea said. “We had a number of child developmental experts on the committee who were able to then bring both their scholarship expertise and the interpretive lens to the question of social media.”

Despite outlining the well-documented potential harms of social media, the report was direct and intentional in its appreciation of the positive aspects of social media: connecting friends and family, providing supportive communities for LGBTQ+ teens, common ground for special-interest affinity groups, providing encouragement for creative pursuits.

“While some users, using social media in particular ways, may have their mental health adversely affected, for many others there will be no such harm, and for others still the experience will be helpful,” Dean Galea writes. “This suggested to the committee a judicious approach to protect youth mental health is warranted than some of the more broad-stroke bans that have been proposed by other entities in recent years.”

In compiling the report, the researchers used an expansive definition of social media adapted from the American Psychological Association that encompassed “social networking, gaming, virtual worlds, video shar­ing sites, and blogs.”

The report reserved some of its strongest criticism for the potentially harmful use of algorithms to promote engagement and create revenue, a deliberate tactic that researchers contend intentionally limits users’ exposure to diverse perspectives and adds additional credence to fringe viewpoints and conspiracies.

The prevalence of online harassment, cyber bullying, and in extreme cases, sexual exploitation of children, prompted suggestions for social media companies to develop better systems for reporting and resolving abuse and harassment, and for the Federal Trade Commission to revise its current regulations to “clarify how to make systems for reporting cases of online harassment and abuse comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.”

And as most parents can confirm, the report cited how social media can often consume time that could be spent in more useful and health-affirming ways, such as sleep, exercise, studying, or pursuing hobbies.

“The platforms also have a distracting power that can conflict with an important developmental window for cultivation of attentional control, a skill necessary for academic success and emotional adjustment,” the report states. “Social media use may reduce adolescents’ ability to sustain attention and sup­press distraction, key components of concentration. At the same time, it is difficult to say that the distraction posed by social media is a function of the media or of the distraction inherent in reading on screens and the related incitements to multitask.”

The committee called for the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and other research funders to “support a research agenda that gives priority to the health conse­quences of social media use, the epidemiology of problematic use, the mechanisms through which social media use influences health, efforts to remediate harms associated with social media use, the role of parents and other adults in influencing positive use, and algo­rithmic audits.” This proposed research agenda could possibly help clarify any “causal pathway between social media use and various health indicators,” one of the facets of social media use the committee was convened to explore.

According to the report, the committee was also charged with asking difficult questions about the broad effects, across different age groups, of social media on physical and mental health and well-being. In pursuing this mandate, the committee also investigated “the relative risks and benefits of various forms of online media and the consequences of media use during childhood and adolescence.” The committee was also asked to identify a research agenda that might help clarify the causal pathway between social media use and various health indicators.

Committee members have expertise in cognitive science, computational science, economics, education, epidemiology, law, media science, mental health, network science, neuroscience, pediatrics, psychol­ogy, social media, and technology.

The project was funded by the Democracy Fund, Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Luminate Proj­ects Limited, the John D. and Catherine MacArthur Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, and the National Academy of Sciences W.K. Kellogg Foundation Fund.