There’s a new moral panic brewing about Instagram. It began with the testimony of Facebook whistleblower and a leaked internal Facebook study about the supposed harmful effects of Instagram on teenage girls, including suicidal ideation and eating disorders. This led to a national freak-out over social media and its corrupting influence over the youth, an argument made best by psychologist Jonathan Haidt in the Atlantic.
But I disagree that the evidence points in this direction. First, although it’s true that we’ve seen a rise in suicides among teen girls in recent years, that’s also true for almost every age demographic. In fact, according to Centers for Disease Control data, suicides are most common among middle aged white men and young Native American men, both of whom have far high suicide rates than teen girls. And the raw increase in suicides among middle aged adults is also much higher than for teenagers.
I suspect we’re indulging a classic “blind men and the elephant” parable here in that by only looking at one group—teenage girls—we’re misdiagnosing a cause when a wider lens would suggest that families are generally in crisis mode.
Anecdotally, as a college professor, I have certainly seen more mental health strain among young adult students recently. And yet, even through my own circumscribed lens, these often seem tied to wider family crises. We need better data than my impression, but I suspect suicide is a systemic, family issue, not linked to technology use.
Moreover, a wealth of studies now find no evidence for a link between social media use and mental health. As for those that do find a link, the effect is often tiny, quite literally the same size as for the impact of potatoes or eyeglass wearing on mental health. Yet we don’t warn parents of the dangers of unsupervised spud eating in youth.
A recent review I participated in conducted by members of the media psychology divisions of the American Psychological Association, Psychological Society of Ireland and British Psychological Society, reviewed the data regarding the impact of screens, social media and smartphones on mental health. Overall, we found little evidence to connect them to mental health.
Of course, our study got less attention than the infamous Facebook whistleblower study that quoted some teen girls saying Instagram makes them feel worse. But that study was roundly criticized by scholars for being junk science. Basically, people often blame the wrong source of their problems, and the questions used in the study were leading.
A gamer uses a Playstation PS4 controller as he plays a video game during the ‘Paris Games Week’ on October 30, 2019 in Paris, France.
Chesnot/Getty
The fact that the study represented an unforced error on the part of Facebook did not at the end of the day magically turn it into good evidence.
Ultimately, the social media panic looks a lot like the long-dead panic over television, in that it’s mainly fueled by social phenomena (rising crime then, suicides now) and is likely to reverse without intervention (as crime did in the early 90s without any regulation of television violence). It seems a clear failure to learn from history. We definitely need more and better studies, but the evidence just isn’t there yet to link social media to mental health.
Something similar is happening on another front: video games. Scholars have debated video game effects for decades—specifically, …….