The Dark Side of Social Media
#29 - The Disturbing Connection Between Social Media and Mental Health in Girls
In case you prefer to read this post in Italian or check out the translations ChatGPT wrote for me.
Hello friends! I hope you're having a great weekend. The inspiration for this week's post comes from an interesting article I read last Sunday that I found very inspiring. While pondering the topic of the article, I also stumbled upon a Dove commercial in this video that was very impactful and convinced me it was a good topic to think and write about.
The original post, which I highly recommend reading, is a very long and detailed analysis of a lot of research papers on the topic of Social Networks and the impact they have on teenagers’ development, with a particular focus on pre-adolescence girls. Being the father of a lovely young girl the topic is very dear to my heart. But when thinking about it I think this is actually a very profound social issue that impacts everyone and that deserves some deep reflection. The author, who is a professor at NYU, also wrote a second piece on the topic where he reacted to comments and feedbacks he had received on the article.
I have already written about similar topics, with a more constructive and positive angle, in a precedent post. I however acknowledge that the role of technology, and specifically mobile phones and social media has a very profound impact on human development, and that probably we have not even fully understood its implications for teenagers. This is arguably the first mobile-native generations, and we still have a very poor and potentially naive understanding of its impact. I believe this is a super important topic to think and talk about, so please forgive the more negative/critic tone of today’s post, I am doing this with a constructive spirit!
A SADNESS EPIDEMIC
The starting point of the article is the US CDC Youth Behavior survey, which in the latest release in Feb’23 showed that most teen girls (57%) now say that they experience persistent sadness or hopelessness (up from 36% in 2011), and 30% of teen girls now say that they have seriously considered suicide (up from 19% in 2011). Boys are doing badly too, but their rates of depression and anxiety are not as high, and their increases since 2011 are smaller.
An epidemic of mental illness (primarily anxiety and depression) began in multiple countries around the same time––the early 2010s. The velocity of the rise is unprecedented. The graphs are shocking and astonishingly similar across measures and countries. Right around 2012 or 2013, teen girls in many countries began reporting higher rates of depression and anxiety, and they began cutting and poisoning themselves in larger numbers. The numbers continued to rise, in most of those countries, throughout the 2010s, with very few reversals.
Obviously as many of similar social researches in the last years, the first hypotesis was that Covid had had a large impact on this trend. However, when diving deeper, authors found that Covid did not have a very material trend. And that actually, when looking at historical data (starting from 2012) there’s a very clear linear trend in the past 10 years. The author argues that “teens were already socially distanced by 2019, which might explain why COVID restrictions added little to their rates of mental illness, on average”.
Most of the news coverage noted that the trends pre-dated covid, and many of them mentioned social media as a potential cause. A few of them then did the standard thing that journalists have been doing for years, saying essentially “gosh, we just don’t know if it’s social media, because the evidence is all correlational and the correlations are really small.” For example, Derek Thompson, wrote a widely read essay in The Atlantic on the multiplicity of possible causes. In a section titled Why is it so hard to prove that social media and smartphones are destroying teen mental health? he noted that “the academic literature on social media’s harms is complicated” and he then quoted one of the main academics studying the issue—Jeff Hancock, of Stanford University: “There’s been absolutely hundreds of [social-media and mental-health] studies, almost all showing pretty small effects.”
The author of the post moves to provide a lot of data around why he believes, backing it with a lot of research, the blame is to put on Social Media. Let me do a quick caveat: these are super complicated and nuanced issues, and obviously each story has its own merit and causes. I am not trying to diminish the importance of individual stories, but I would like to keep the conversation on “averages”, sometimes consciously over-simplifying a uber-complex topic for the sake of narrative. Social phenomena are hardly explained by one-factor explanations, let’s clear that out immediately.
WHAT COULD BE THE KEY CAUSES?
The author argues that one key cause of the higher rate of depression in Gen-Z is the “vast overprotection of children that began in the 1990s.” In brief, it’s the transition from a play-based childhood involving a lot of risky unsupervised play, which is essential for overcoming fear and fragility, to a phone-based childhood which blocks normal human development by taking time away from sleep, play, and in-person socializing, as well as causing addiction and drowning kids in social comparisons they can’t win. So this is not a one-factor story, but the author’s post is about what he believes to be the largest single factor and the only one that can explain why the epidemic started so suddenly, around 2012, in multiple countries.
SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT SUGAR!
Once you appreciate the extent to which childhood has been transformed by smartphones and social media, you can see why it’s a mistake to focus so narrowly on individual-level effects. Nearly all of the research have treated social media as if it were like sugar consumption. The basic question has been: how sick do individuals get as a function of how much sugar they consume? What does the curve look like when you graph illness on the Y axis as a function of daily dosage on the X axis? This is a common and proper approach in medical research, where effects are primarily studied at the individual level and our objective is to know the size of the “dose-response relationship.”
But social media is very different because it transforms social life for everyone, even for those who don’t use social media, whereas sugar consumption just harms the consumer. To see why this difference matters, imagine that in 2011, just before the epidemic began, a 12-year-old girl was given an iPhone 4 (the first with a front-facing camera) and began to spend 5 hours a day taking and editing selfies, posting them on Instagram (which had launched the year before), and scrolling through hundreds of posts from others. This was at a time when none of her friends in 7th grade had a smartphone or any social media accounts. Suppose that Instagram does cause anxiety disorders in a dose-response way, but the size of the correlation with anxiety is smaller than the correlation of social isolation with anxiety. The girl spending 5 hours a day on Instagram finds her mental health declining, but her friends’ mental health is unchanged. We find a clear dose-response effect. If she were to quit Instagram, would her mental health improve? Yes.
But now fast forward to 2015, when most girls are on Instagram and all teens are spending far less time with their friends in person. Most social activity is now asynchronous—channeled through posts, comments, and emojis on Instagram, Snapchat, and a few other platforms. Childhood has been rewired—it has become phone-based—and rates of anxiety and depression are soaring. Suppose that in 2015, a 12-year-old girl decided to quit all social media platforms. Would her mental health improve? Not necessarily.
If all of her friends continued to spend 5 hours a day on the various platforms then she’d find it difficult to stay in touch with them. She’d be out of the loop and socially isolated. If the isolation effect is larger than the dose-response effect, then her mental health might even get worse. When we look across thousands of girls, we might find no strong or clear correlation between time on social media and level of mental disorder. We might even find that the non-users are more depressed and anxious than the moderate users (which some studies do find, known as the Goldilocks effect).
What we see in this second case is that social media creates a cohort effect: something that happened to a whole cohort of young people, including those who don’t use social media. It also creates a trap—a collective action problem—for girls and for parents. Each girl might be worse off quitting Instagram even though all girls would be better off if everyone quit.
HOW DO WE CONCLUDE SOCIAL MEDIA IS REALLY THE KEY DRIVER?
The great majority of studies find a positive correlation between time on social media and mental health problems, especially mood disorders (depression and anxiety). The author studied a multitude of papers and concluded that 55 found a significant correlation, and 11 that found no relationship, or nearly no relationship. The correlations are widely found and they are not randomly distributed. In fact, there is a revealing pattern found across many studies and literature reviews: Those that look at all screen-based activities (including television) for all kids (including boys) generally find only small correlations (usually less than r = .10), but as you zoom in on social media for girls the correlations rise, sometimes to r = .20, which is quite substantial.
Granted, these correlations don’t prove causation, but the frequent finding that the correlations are consistently higher for social media, and higher for girls, tells us that we’re not just looking at random noise here. There is a consistent story emerging from these hundreds of correlational studies.
The chart above has 3 key features that jump out:
The rates of mood disorders are higher for girls than boys.
The lines are curved: moderate users are often no worse off than non-users, but as we move into heavy use, the lines rise more quickly.
The dose-response effect is larger for girls. For boys, moving from 2 to 5 hours of daily use is associated with a doubling of depression rates. For girls, it’s associated with a tripling.
HOW BAD IS THIS?
At this point the author of the post takes a tangent to show with statistical evidence this correlation between social media and depression that I find interesting but way too detailed for my tastes. Personally the arguments above are very intuitive and convincing, anyone of us probably has thought something similar in the past, and while it’s important to keep in mind evidence and consider alternative factors, I would give for granted that social media have a material impact on teenagers development and happiness.
Appreciating there are alternative views, the key question for readers — and particularly parents, school administrators, and legislators — is which side you should listen to as you think about what policies to adopt or change. How should you decide? Parents and policymakers should consider Pascal’s Wager: If you listen to the alarm ringers and we turn out to be wrong, the costs are minimal and reversible. But if you listen to the skeptics and they turn out to be wrong, the costs are much larger and harder to reverse.
Philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal famously calculated that it’s worth believing in God even if you think there is only a remote chance that God exists because if God does not exist, then the harm to you from living in a Godly way unnecessarily is minimal, and in any case, you only have to keep it up for a few decades. But if God does exist and if the decision about whether you’ll spend eternity blissed out in heaven or roasting in hell depends on whether you believed in God during your lifetime, well, you do the math.
The part that I personally find way more interesting is: why is this trend more relevant for girls? And is there anything we can learn from there that we can leverage to at minimum appreciate this phenomenon and ideally do something about it?
I listed some key factors that I believe are more relevant for girls vs boys in how social media impact their happiness as teenagers:
Societal expectations and beauty standards. One of the key reasons why teenage girls tend to be more affected by social media is the unrealistic beauty standards perpetuated on these platforms. Girls are bombarded with images of "perfect" bodies, clear skin, and fashionable outfits, which can lead to low self-esteem and body dissatisfaction. These pressures to conform to societal expectations can contribute to depression and anxiety. While these is true for boys too, it’s evident to everyone that we live in a highly generized society, this is the impact of a male-oriented society.
Cyberbullying and harassment. Teenage girls are more likely to experience cyberbullying and harassment on social media, which can have severe emotional consequences. From body shaming to explicit threats, online harassment can lead to feelings of helplessness, fear, and isolation. These negative experiences can significantly contribute to depression and suicidal ideation.
Emotional expression and vulnerability. Teenage girls are generally more emotionally expressive than boys, which can make them more vulnerable to the negative effects of social media. Girls may be more likely to seek validation, support, and connection through social media, potentially exposing them to negative feedback, criticism, and rejection. This can lead to feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness, which can contribute to depression and suicidal thoughts.
WHAT ARE WE DOING TO OUR TEEN GIRLS?
There is one giant, obvious, international, and gendered cause: Social media. Instagram was founded in 2010. The iPhone 4 was released then too—the first smartphone with a front-facing camera. In 2012 Facebook bought Instagram, and that’s the year that its user base exploded. By 2015, it was becoming normal for 12-year-old girls to spend hours each day taking selfies, editing selfies, and posting them for friends, enemies, and strangers to comment on, while also spending hours each day scrolling through photos of other girls and fabulously wealthy female celebrities with (seemingly) vastly superior bodies and lives. The hours girls spent each day on Instagram were taken from sleep, exercise, and time with friends and family. What did we think would happen to them?
I could write a lot about this and there’s a lot of evidence of why Social Media have particularly negative implications for girls (vs boys) but I think that the video below makes a fantastic job at that. I recommend you invest 3’ watching it, you need to click the link to watch it because its sensitive content makes the preview not work.
IS THERE A SILVER LINING IN ALL THIS?
While writing this post, I kept all sides of the story in mind and considered whether there may be a good side to this social media trend. In an earlier post, I mentioned something interesting that Bianca Balti, a former model, said in a podcast. She commented on her very problematic and drug-intense teen years, and argued that the main reason for this was that, living in a small provincial town, she felt "different" and could not find people with similar interests. She believes that social media is a fantastic enabler to "find people like you", understand that you're not "wrong", and enable a social circle (even if just virtually) that is a massive safety net when you're a teenager. This could be a great factor in preventing drug use and depression.
I find the argument valid, and I believe that to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater, we should focus our efforts on limiting the negative impacts of social media and doubling down on the positive ones. Building communities, finding people with similar interests, and providing a sense of belonging are positive things that we need to focus on. However, we should also be aware of the negative impacts of these tools and avoid letting the 2017 article, "Have smartphones destroyed an entire generation?," prove right.
Do you have any informative or interesting reading material on this topic that could help me gain a better understanding and improve my views? More importantly, what solutions should we implement as a society to prevent this issue from becoming more dire?
Hope you have a fantastic weekend!