Sam Bowman is the editor of Works in Progress magazine.
A lot of parents worry about their kids and the internet. Fears about social media addiction and age-inappropriate content have already led Australia to ban social media accounts for children under the age of 16. Other countries like France and Spain are following.
By some measures, teenagers’ mental health does seem to have gotten worse over the past 10 years, and this does coincide with widespread adoption of smartphones. But that is where any clear correlation between the two ends. Multiple studies have either shown that smartphone and social media use among teens has minimal effects on their mental health or none at all. As a 2024 review published by an American Psychological Association journal put it: “There is no evidence that time spent on social media is correlated with adolescent mental health problems.”
This does not mean that parents are wrong to worry. The body of research is incomplete, imperfect and evolving, and the picture may change as new evidence emerges and social media platforms change. A 2023 advisory by then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy highlighted some particular areas of risk online, including cyberbullying and content encouraging self-harm. One study looking at the staggered rollout of Facebook on college campuses in the 2000s found that it was associated with higher rates of depression among students. But if the strong claims that are sometimes made about the harms of social media are true, it is remarkable how difficult it is to find consistent evidence to support them.
Advocates of bans compare social media to alcohol or tobacco, where the harms are indisputable and the benefits are minimal. But the internet, including social media, is more analogous to books, magazines or television. I may not want my sons watching “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” or reading “Fifty Shades of Grey,” but it would be crazy to ban books and films for kids altogether.
But that is the nature of these social media bans. Australia’s law not only restricted access to platforms such as Instagram and TikTok but also banned kids under 16 from having YouTube, X and Reddit accounts. Even Substack had to modify its practices.
These services all host content that curious teenagers can learn from. YouTube channels like Kurzgesagt, 3Blue1Brown and Kings and Generals produce engaging, insightful explanations of everything from why people get fevers to differential calculus to why the Romans stopped at the Rhine. Substack publications like Anton Howes’s on the economic history of the Industrial Revolution, or Ruxandra Teslo’s on biotechnology and women’s health, give the brightest kids access to the intellectual frontier and allow them to look beyond the tedium of their classrooms and textbooks.
Through my involvement in Emergent Ventures, a program which gives grants to bright youngsters with ideas in science, technology and the arts, I have seen just how many brilliant teenagers there are around the world. Avi Schiffmann was 17 when he built one of the leading covid-19 case trackers. Neil Deshmukh was even younger when he built an app for farmers in India to identify diseases in their crops. It is often the internet, including social media, that gives young people access to the ideas and people they need to realize their talents.
Being a teenager can be incredibly boring. My own teenage years in rural Ireland were much more bearable thanks to Xbox Live, MSN Messenger and online discussion forums about topics I was interested in that my friends were not (back then, North Korea and the economics of global trade). If I was a kid today, I would probably turn to Reddit, YouTube, Discord and Twitter for similar content. Not wanting our kids to scroll on TikTok or Instagram all day doesn’t mean not wanting them to enjoy and learn from social media at all.
When we actually ask teens what their experience of social media is, they are pretty positive about it: 71 percent say it gives them a place to show their creative sides and 67 percent say it gives them people who can support them through tough times. Kids who have a mostly positive experience online outnumber those who have a mostly negative one by 3 to 1. Most say it’s a mixed bag.
Eli Stark-Elster notes that the fall in teenage happiness coincides with stricter approaches to schooling and higher homework burdens. Teenage suicide rates in the U.S. are much higher on school days and in school months, and are lowest in July when most kids aren’t in school. The focus on social media and smartphones may be distracting us from much more significant causes of misery in teenagers’ lives.
The truth is we don’t know what the best approach is. That is an argument in favor of allowing family-by-family decisions. Parental controls may need to be strengthened to give them greater oversight within apps, not just the ability to block or limit time spent on them. This could include powers to disable algorithmic feeds or have more fine-grained control over what content their children can see on them, both of which may require legislation. But in the absence of clear evidence that teens are being hurt by social media, taking these decisions away from parents is an intervention too far.
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