Nearly half of teens say social media is bad for youth mental health, report finds

By Clare Duffy, CNN

New York (CNN) — The impact of social media on young people’s mental health and well-being is a growing topic of concern among parents, educators, health care professionals and regulators. And now, nearly half of US teens say social media has a mostly negative effect on people their age — and almost the same proportion say they’re cutting back on social media use.

That’s according to a Pew Research Center report published Tuesday that asked American teens and parents about their attitudes around social media and smartphones. It offers an updated glimpse into how teens view their own social media use, following a separate Pew study from December that found nearly half of US teens say they’re online almost constantly.

The report comes as parents and regulators have called on social media companies to do more to keep young people safe — and prevent them from spending too much time — on their platforms.

Last year, then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy asked Congress to require a label on social media apps warning of risks to young people, similar to those on alcohol and tobacco. Australia also passed a world-first law banning teens under 16 from social media. And in March, Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed a landmark bill requiring app stores to verify users’ ages and share that data with app developers, in a bid to protect teens from accessing age-inappropriate content online.

To conduct the study, Pew surveyed 1,391 US teens ages 13 to 17 and their parents during September and October of last year.

Of the teen respondents, 48% said they think social media has a “mostly negative” effect on people their age, up from 32% when Pew asked the same questions in a different survey in 2022. Just 11% of teens today say they think social media is “mostly positive” for their peers.

But just 14% of teens say social media has a mostly negative impact on themselves, although that figure has jumped from 9% in 2022.

Still, teens are seemingly trying to rein in their own social media use; 45% say they spend too much time on social media, up from 36% in 2022. And 44% of teen respondents said they have cut back on time spent on social media and their smartphones.

“The overuse of social media in our society seems to be the main cause of depression among those in my age group,” a teen boy quoted in the report wrote. “People seem to let themselves be affected by the opinions of people they don’t know, and it wreaks havoc upon people’s states of mind.”

.The report suggests that the effects of social media vary somewhat by gender and race and ethnicity. Teen girls, for example, are slightly more likely than teen boys to say social media has hurt the amount of sleep they get, their productivity, their mental health and their confidence.

Those findings are consistent with research from 2019 that has suggested the link between social media and depression may be stronger in teen girls than boys, and that social media may harm girls’ mental health by increasing their exposure to bullying and decreasing activities that have a positive impact on wellbeing, such as sleep.

In 2021, internal documents from social media giant Meta, made public after a whistleblower disclosure, showed that the company’s research found that Instagram makes “body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.” Meta has since introduced new policies and practices aimed at improving teen safety, including updated AI tools announced Monday designed to catch teens lying about their age on the app.

Girls (48%) are more likely to say they’ve cut back on social media use than boys (40%), according to Tuesday’s report.

General mental wellbeing among teens is a broader concern; 89% of parents and 77% of teens reported being either “somewhat” or “extremely” worried about the issue.

But parents are still more anxious about how social media is impacting their children than the teens themselves, the report suggests. Social media (44%) and technology generally (14%) ranked highest as the one thing parents believed negatively impacted teens’ mental health, whereas only 22% and 8% of teens, respectively, said the same.

“Technology, which is making them more afraid to try things, makes them less creative and makes them less likely to figure out how to solve their own problems, whether relationally or physically,” a mother of a teen said in the survey.

However, it’s not all bad.

Nearly six in 10 teens said social media gives them “a place to show their creative side,” and even more said it helps them stay connected to what’s happening in their friends’ lives.

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