The Companies That Built Social Media Are the Only Ones Who Know the Harms It Can Do
Two academic studies suggest social media barely harms teenagers. The internal documents from Meta's own researchers tell a different story — and explain why the gap exists.
Last week, Pew Research published a survey of 1,458 American teenagers — the most current data we have on how kids think about the platforms they use. The headline finding: most teens say TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat don’t hurt their mental health. Only 9 to 11 percent of users said these apps had harmed them.
That landed in the same conversation as a Stanford study from last year that is still circulating widely. I saw someone announce last week he was quitting social media for a year on the basis of it. That study — the largest randomized experiment ever conducted on social media deactivation, involving 35,000 participants and 27 co-authors — found that deactivating Instagram produced effects so small that the researchers’ own language described the anxiety and depression outcomes as statistically indistinguishable from zero.
Two data points. Both being used, especially by the industry, to suggest social media is basically fine for kids.
Here is the problem with both of them.
The Stanford study was conducted during the six weeks before the 2020 presidential election — a period unusual enough that its authors urged caution about generalizing from it. Eight of the 27 co-authors work for Meta. Less than one percent of people invited to participate actually completed the study. And the effects that did appear — 0.041 standard deviations for Instagram — fall roughly ten times short of the 0.41 standard deviations that researchers use as the threshold for clinical significance, meaning effects people would actually notice in their own lives.
The Pew report is more nuanced than its headline suggests. Yes, 9 to 11 percent of teens say the platforms hurt their mental health — though at the scale of billions of users, that is not a small number. More teens reported negative effects on sleep and productivity than on mental health, with TikTok leading on both. And there’s an important gap between how teenagers describe the platforms’ effect on themselves versus their peers: a separate Pew survey drawing on fall 2024 data found that 48 percent of teens believe social media is mostly negative for people their age — up from 32 percent in 2022. Teenagers may be better at seeing what the platforms do to the people around them than to themselves. Parents are more pessimistic still: 24 percent say social media hurt their teen’s mental health versus 8 percent who say it helped.
None of this, I would argue, settles the question.
