Social Media Is Harming Young People at a Scale Large Enough to Cause Changes at the Population Level

Is social media use reasonably safe for children and adolescents? We call this the “product safety question,” and we present seven lines of evidence showing that the answer is no. The evidence of harm is found in: 1) surveys of young people; 2) surveys of parents, teachers, and clinicians; 3) contents from corporate documents; 4) findings from cross-sectional studies; 5) findings from longitudinal studies; 6) findings from social media reduction experiments; and 7) findings from natural experiments. We show that there is now overwhelming evidence of severe and widespread direct harms (such as cyberbullying and sextortion), and compelling evidence of troubling indirect harms (such as depression). Furthermore, we show that the harms and risks to individual users are so diverse and vast in scope that they justify the view that social media is causing harm at a population level. We further argue that when these lines of evidence are considered alongside the timing, scope, and cross-national trends in adolescent well-being and mental health, they can help answer a second question: Was the rapid adoption of always-available social media by adolescents in the early 2010s a substantial contributor to the population-level increases in mental illness that emerged by the mid 2010s in many Western nations? We call this the “historical trends question.” We draw on our findings about the vast scale of harm uncovered while answering the product safety question to argue that the answer to the historical trends question is “yes.”