Social media needs science-based guidelines

Social media is a part of adolescents’ daily reality, and as such it necessarily influences their behaviour and development. There is heated academic debate about the consequences of this influence and how to deal with them. However, academics are not the only ones interested in this debate. Some of the most profitable private companies in the world, along with citizens and governments, are concerned about the outcome of this discussion.

The debate has financial implications for social media companies, which are constantly working to find new users and increase the time and money that users spend on their platforms. Through this lens, young people are an attractive market that can potentially increase revenue for products that already generate billions of dollars annually. Revenue objectives are linked to technological advances (for example, apps specifically designed to nudge users to engage with the platforms)¹, leading social media technology to develop fast. Within this logic of constant technological advances and ever-growing profits, limiting the use of social media to respond to potential safety concerns is simply not part of the business model. Even if it were, the speed of advancements means that by the time psychological science reaches conclusions about the impact of a specific platform, social media technology has already changed.

In a Comment published in this issue, Montag et al. argue that governments must step up to ensure the safety of adolescents in the digital age. Policy makers should design legislation to proactively prevent potential harm. The authors suggest that such legislative measures should be informed by well-funded and structured research conducted by independent academics from multidisciplinary backgrounds. In particular, Montag et al. propose that research input is needed on the appropriateness of entry age barriers for social media platforms and that researchers should be granted access to scrutinize the design features and digital infrastructure that companies use to engage users. Research insights about safety concerns could enable the development of healthier social media platforms.

In the absence of a clear evidence base, guidelines and recommendations are put forward that play on parents’ fears despite a lack of supporting evidence. Writing in Nature², Candice Odgers notes that such fear-based parental guidelines are profitable for the publishers because they create alarm and are therefore shared widely. However, those guidelines might promote policies that are untested and might therefore be ineffective or create new problems. Moreover, focusing only on social media reduces the complexity of one of the most challenging problems in modern society: the rise in the prevalence of mental health conditions and suicide among adolescents over the past decade^3,4.

Because this rise in the prevalence of mental health conditions in adolescents coincides with the increase in digital technologies and social media use, some speculate that these trends are related⁵. However, the onset and development of mental health disorders cannot be reduced to a single cause. In a Review in this issue, Orben et al. side-step the question of whether social media use is or is not associated with adolescent mental health, and instead consider how social media acts as an amplifier of the socioemotional and neurobiological changes that increase mental health vulnerability during adolescence. Indeed, most mental health conditions have an onset before the age of 25.

Drawing on the concept of ‘affordances’ (the perceived and flexible action possibilities of digital environments, such as broad visibility of content and the persistence of online content over time), Orben et al. consider both potentially harmful effects of social media (such as promotion of risky behaviour) and potentially beneficial effects (such as exploring self-identify without ‘real-world’ consequences). They argue that focusing on social media features and considering the mechanisms by which these features interact with developmental changes provides a productive framework for researchers to study the effects of technology despite an ever-changing social media landscape. Ultimately, such work could lead to specific science-based interventions to protect and promote adolescent mental health.

“We join the call to redirect the focus of the conversation […] towards the important problem of how to improve the mental health of the world’s youth”

Psychologists are increasingly asked to contribute — and sometimes lead — many of the most relevant conversations of our times. The rise of mental health problems in adolescents is one of these conversations, and how the community of psychological scientists responds to this challenge will shape the future of a whole generation. We join the call to redirect the focus of the conversation away from the ‘moral panic’ of new technology and towards the important problem of how to improve the mental health of the world’s youth.