Teens, the report said, had “an addict’s narrative about their use. One of the things teens disliked the most about the app was how much time they spent on it. Comparatively, among girls who used social media less than one hour a day, only 15% were depressed.Īlthough the internal Facebook research didn’t examine links between time on Instagram and mental health, they did ask teens about what were, in their view, the worst aspects of Instagram. found that one-quarter of 15-year-old girls spent more than five hours a day using social media – and 38% of those girls were clinically depressed. That’s important because many teens, especially girls, spend large amounts of time on social media. A ticking time bomb for mental healthĪcademic research shows that the more hours a day a teen spends on social media, the more likely she or he is to be depressed or to self-harm. There are two primary ways the company can do this: enforcing time limits and increasing the minimum age of users. Facebook’s own research strongly suggests that social media should be subject to more stringent regulation and include more guardrails to protect the mental health of its users. They suggest not only that Facebook knew how Instagram could be harmful, but that the company also was aware of possible solutions to mitigate those harms. The details in the 209 pages are revealing. Six internal documents summarizing the research, leaked by a whistle-blower, were posted in full on Sept. Just six months later, The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook had been doing its own research for years on the negative effects of Instagram, the company’s photo-sharing app popular with teens and young adults. Yet when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked during a congressional hearing in March to acknowledge the connection between social media and these troubling mental health trends, he replied, “I don’t think that the research is conclusive on that.” Social scientists like myself have been warning for years that the ubiquity of social media might be at the root of the growing mental health crisis for teens. and emergency room admissions for self-harm tripled among U.S. and globally, suicide rates soared for teens in the U.S. Between 20, rates of depression and loneliness doubled in the U.S. Right at the time social media became popular, teen mental health began to falter.
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