Social media & teen health

[00:00:24]

RICK WEISS: Hello everyone and welcome to this SciLine media briefing on social media and teen health. I am SciLine’s director Rick Weiss. And for those of you not familiar with SciLine, we are a philanthropically funded, editorially independent, free service for reporters and scientists based at the nonprofit American Association for the Advancement of Science. Our mission is pretty straightforward. It’s to make it as easy as possible for you, as reporters, to include scientist sources and scientifically validated information in your news stories, whether those stories are about an actual topic in science or are about things going on in your community. Ranging from the whole panoply of things you all cover from downtown development issues, to immigration, to crime and safety, all of which are topics that scientists study. And that we can help you get an expert to help you get through your story and add some factual information to those stories. That service I’m talking about there is known as our expert matching service. It works sort of like a dating game, but we will find you an expert within your deadline on any topic that you are writing about so you can add that kind of rigorously vetted information to those stories.

A few quick logistical details before we get started with this briefing. We’re going to have three speakers today. Each of them is going to speak for just five to seven minutes each to give you some basics about this topic. And then we’ll open it up for Q&A during their presentations or after. Please go to the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen and type in your question using your name and your news outlet. And if you want the question to be directed to one of the speakers in particular, let us know that as well. A full video of this briefing is going to be available by the end of the day today, and a transcript with time stamps will be available within a day or two after. If you need something more quickly than that, just put a message to us in that Q&A icon and we will get you raw copies soon as this briefing ends.

I’m not going to go through everyone’s bios, I want to get started, but I do want to tell you just briefly who is going to be speaking. So I’ll just tell you that we will hear first from Colleen McClain. Colleen is a research associate at the Pew Research Center whose work has included a focus on people’s interactions with the internet and technology, including youth and social media. And she’s going to give, basically, an overview of how and how much young people are using social media today with some interesting demographic breakdowns. We’re going to hear second from Linda Charmaraman, who is a senior research scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women and founding director of the Youth, Media and Wellbeing Research Lab, both at Wellesley College, who’s going to focus on what the research says about the impacts of social media, both positive and negative, on the mental health of youth and teens. And then to get into the physical health side, we’re going to hear from Dr. Jason Nagata, who is an associate professor of pediatrics at U.C. San Francisco. And he’s going to focus, again, on the impacts of social media use and screen time, generally, on various physical aspects of health in youth and teens. Okay, with that introduction, let’s get started and I’ll turn it over to you, Colleen McClain.

[00:04:17]

COLLEEN MCCLAIN: Thank you all and thank you for bearing with me as I share my screen. I am really excited to be here today to share with you some data from our Pew Research Center’s surveys of teens themselves. We have been surveying teams for over a decade now and we are really excited to really center their voices, their experiences, their views, and this really important national conversation. I’m going to jump right in and very quickly just give you a few notes about who we are. We are a nonprofit fact tank. We are nonprofit. We are nonpartisan. And our mission is to generate a foundation of facts.

So, like I mentioned, I’m going to be setting the stage for a lot of the wonderful information that our other panelists will share today and really focus on describing the landscape of teen social media use. Everything I’m going to be presenting to you today is from our surveys. These are conducted via a survey of parents of teens and then their teens themselves. And at the very end, I’ll discuss a bit of data that also is from our surveys of U.S. adults. I want to jump right into the findings and set the stage for you. Here you are seeing our trend data on the social media sites, and apps, and the online platforms that teens are using. And you can see, if you look over on the right, our newest data here from 2023. We ask teens if they use a variety of different apps or sites. And I should say before I move any further that by teenagers, I’m referring to those between the ages of 13 and 17. We have seen a few dramatic changes in the past decade, and I want to give you a couple of the highlights. First, you see at the top, YouTube continues to dominate among online platforms. Nearly all teens say that they ever use this. TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram remain popular among teens and are used by majorities of them. Teens are less likely to be using Facebook and X, of course formerly Twitter, than they were a decade ago. You can see that these trend changes as you look across the chart. In other cases, we haven’t seen a lot of change over the past year. So for example, you can see TikTok, the orange line here, emerges as one of the key players in the social media landscape for teens and adults over the past few years. And the share of teens who are using it in our newest data is statistically similar to the share who was using it a year ago.

There are lots of things that I could walk you through here, including demographic breaks, and I’ll show you a slide at the end of my presentation where you can reference all of those. But I’m just going to talk you through a few of them very briefly and I’m happy to answer questions. Some gender breaks that we find in our data. So we find teen girls are more likely than teen boys to say they use Instagram, BeReal, TikTok, Snapchat, and Facebook. On the other hand, teen boys are more likely than teen girls to use sites like Discord, Twitch, Reddit, and YouTube. And just a quick comment on race and ethnicity as well. I’ll just point your attention to two sites. 8 in 10 Black teens report using TikTok. That compares with 70 percent of Hispanic teens and 57 percent of white teens. And we also see that Black teens are more likely than Hispanic or white teens to be Twitter users. Again, lots I could talk you through here, but one thing that I’d really like to highlight is the frequency with which teens are using some of these sites.

So, a tremendous amount of the conversation today is centered around the amount of time teens are spending on these platforms. And what I’m showing you here is the share of all U.S. teens who say they visit or use these five platforms that we followed up on almost constantly in the dark blue, several times a day, about once a day. And what you see here is that if you look at the numbers on the right, about half—roughly half or more say they’re on sites like TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram daily. And for some teens in the dark blue shares on the left, you see that their use is self-described as almost constant. There are gender differences here as well. What you’re looking at here is teen boys in the blue dots, and teens girls in the green dots. And I want to point out the teen girls are more likely than teen boys to say they almost constantly use TikTok. Same type of pattern for Snapchat. But there are little to no differences in the shares of boys and girls who are almost constantly using YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook.

Again, just a brief touch on race and ethnicity and I’m happy to go into more of this in the Q&A. I mentioned earlier that we saw some differences with Black teens being more likely to use some platforms than others. Here, looking at frequency among all teens, Hispanic teens stand out. So for example, about 1/3 of Hispanic teens say that they are almost constantly on TikTok.

Now, I don’t have much time with you and I would love to share so many findings, but I do want to talk a bit about some of the positive and negative outcomes teens report when we ask them about their use of social media generally. So now we’re moving from specific platforms to social media generally. One of the themes that we see in our work is that social media is not a monolith. So the story of teens on social media is neither all good nor all bad. One thing that we’ve found is that teens are actually more likely to say social media’s impact on them personally has been mostly positive than mostly negative. So you here—see here in the blue at the top, about a third of teens say social media’s impact on them has been mostly positive. And that compares with in the grain, 9 percent who say it’s been mostly negative. We asked teens to tell us in their own words why this was the case depending on what they said. And we see here at the bottom, these are coded open end responses, that, in their words, connection and socializing tops the list of reasons that teens say, ‘Yes, it’s been mostly positive on me and here is why.’

Now teens, of course, also experience downsides to social media as well. And these are some closed ended questions we asked people about how often they feel various ways when they spend time on social media and what they see on social media. So in addition to some of the more positive aspects like connection and creativity, we asked teens about the darker sides. And you can see here, so for example, about 4 in 10 teens over on the right, top left in the—in the column, say they feel, overall, at least a little overwhelmed by all the drama they see on social media. And about a quarter feel at least a little worse about their own lives based on what they see on social media. There are gender differences here as well. On the two items I just mentioned, overwhelm and worse about their own lives, as well as feelings of feeling left out. So you see girls in the blue and green—and boys in the green as well, again. I want to close by circling back to some of the national conversations surrounding these issues. And so there has been so much conversation about teens and social media, the amount of time they spend, their impacts, which my other—the other panelists today will go into in detail.

But I want to show you some findings from our surveys of U.S. teens and U.S. adults. So what you are seeing here is findings from two different surveys that were both conducted in fall 2023. And I want to point your attention to the first item here. So, this is the percent of each who say they support social media companies requiring parental consent for minors to create a social media account. The vast majority, 81 percent, in the blue of U.S. adults say they support this. What you don’t see here is that 7 percent oppose and 12 percent are unsure. There is strong bipartisan support. We also see some age differences. So adults under 30 are less likely to support this than older adults. When you look at teens in the green, the story is different. So a far smaller share, though still nearly half of U.S. teens, say they support requiring parental consent for this. Twenty-five percent of teens oppose and 28 percent, a sizable share, are not sure. I won’t go through all these other findings, but I do want to point out below the—the findings at the bottom on setting limits on how much time minors can spend on social media. So we see about 7 in 10 adults say they support social media companies doing this. About 1/3 of U.S. teens say the same. Thank you so much. I have so much more I could share with you, but I will turn it over to my other panelists. I will briefly note that further down in these slides, I have a breakdown of all the demographics that I mentioned. Lots of numbers. I didn’t want to talk through these all today, but happy to answer questions. As well as links to some of our recent reports. There are many more than this, but just a sampling of what we have here at Pew Research Center on teens, social media, and technology today.

[00:14:06]

RICK WEISS: Thank you, Colleen. That was a beautiful presentation of all the basics that are going to support our discussion today. And super interesting data at the end about the difference in attitudes between teens and their parents. And interesting on that last question that it was about whether companies should set limits. I wonder what they’d all say about parents being responsible for those limits, but that’s another discussion. Let’s move on to talk about mental health issues and, for that, Dr. Linda Charmaraman.

[00:14:37]

LINDA CHARMARAMAN: Hi everybody. I am so excited to be here as well. And I feel so lucky to go after Colleen. I am always using your Pew Research results in our own reports and articles.

And here’s just a little bit about me, and I did want to kind of make sure everybody knew that my funding comes—my research funding comes from the National Institutes of Health, and Children and Screens, and nonprofit organizations. I’m consulting with different community organizations like Jed Foundation and things like that. So my research is pretty much federal or foundation funded. I’m going to talk to you about some of the advisories that came out in the past year from the American Psychological Association, for instance. I was one of the task force members and co-authors of this particular advisory. And as Colleen said before, that it’s—it’s not a monolithic story that social media tells. It’s not inherently good or bad. It really depends on what everybody brings to the equation, you know? Do they have vulnerabilities or strengths that they bring to it and use while they’re actually an online user? And it also depends on the context that they grew up in. What kind of families that they—that are available to support their use or misuse. It’s an online playground, I like to say. Just like playgrounds are fraught with a lot of potential fun, and excitement, and possibilities, and creativity. But there’s also things where people fall down and scrape their knees and there’s bullying on the playground too. And it all kind—kind of comes together. It’s at your own risk, in a way, but we all want to pre-arm our youth with some of the—some of the negatives so that you can enjoy the positives.

So, the pros are about pressing social skills, kind of like some of those tables that Colleen was talking about. There’s also things like giving and receiving social support, and exploring interests and hobbies, and also algorithms that youth have said that they enjoy that algorithm seems to know what they like to see. They like to see useful content, like to see relevant content that really matches with their identities. The cons are that yes, they are—they can be distracting from other tasks that they need to be doing, like studying, and doing chores, and making in real life connections. There’s also potential for excessive social comparisons. It’s normal and developmentally appropriate for people to do social comparisons in adolescence, but there could be some potential, because of the online nature of things always being at your fingertips, there’s always the potential for mean comments and rumors spreading online. And also on the negative end of algorithms, there could be things that trigger emotional—things that could occur that could trigger being upset, or angry, or sadness. There’s also age-inappropriate content that might come up on social media.

And so we just wanted to make sure that the advisory kind of point—pointed out that there’s both pros and cons to social media. And I love that Colleen already put in that half of—both halves of the—this table and I’d like to just point out that different groups might experience it in different ways. Girls both say that it makes them feel more supported, but also that there’s more of an overwhelming drama being excluded by friends. And what I would like to say as a take away from this is that it’s the narrative of yes and, you know? Just like the—that previous slide, yes on the playground of the digital world, there’s going to be fun, and excitement, and connection, and feeling accepted. But then there’s also going to be, oh, gosh, I don’t—my life doesn’t look as good as them. I have FOMO. I have—people are being mean and spreading rumors and—but it seems to be less often they’re saying that it’s like the primarily negative. It’s more likely that they’re saying it’s primarily positive. And especially for girls, that’s the difference.

So, one big thing, one take away point that may not be something that some of you reporters need this as a reminder, but a lot of the studies that come out about social media, mental health, and the linkages are correlational studies. And it’s about associating one X with a Y. And a lot of—a lot of the studies to date have been pretty much one time only, cross sectional they call it. It’s also focused on older youth, like on college and beyond, and not on adolescence. And adolescence has very specific vulnerable periods of there’s early adolescence, you know, the tween years, and then there’s the older adolescence that have different cognitive capacities and different developmental tasks that they’re working on. There’s also a mix of conflicting positive and negative null association across all the studies that you might be seeing come across your desk. If you find a study that shows a positive association between depression and social media use, for instance, you’ll find another say that also sees either no association. Or even the opposite, that the more that you’re on social media, the less depressed you get. And so it really depends on the subjects—the subjects that are recruited, the sample, the sample size, and the methods that are used. And so one thing I wanted to say that a lot of times reporters will kind of fix in on the—maybe a particular study, like one study that has the answer.

But, really, a lot of these studies are—have very small samples or small effect sizes and they’re not as much of a clinical or practical significance as we all would want from—based on just one study and—and so the next slide is about the message, that advisory that came out of American Academy of Pediatrics that was also saying things like digital media is developmentally appropriate. It’s not like it’s a message from pediatricians that’s saying, oh my gosh, we need to get all—everybody needs to get off online because you’re wasting your time. The message is it’s normal to want to be online. And, in fact, there’s risks and benefits for people of all ages. It’s not just teens. It’s adults too who have risks and benefits of being online. And that when you look at large cross-sectional results looking at the link between digital wellbeing and—digital media use and wellbeing, it explains less than 1 percent of your wellbeing.

So all these significant findings that you’re seeing on some of these cross-sectional studies, it explains so little. But there’s a lot being said about them implications wise. And so this advisor is trying to promote the idea that what doesn’t work is a shame-based standard, that everybody should be feeling ashamed, like, parents should be feeling ashamed that their kids are online at all. That actually, shame-based narratives reduces the possibility for us to actually have dialogue with each other about what is normal and appropriate, what is good for our family, what works for our family. And there’s no blanket statement of the minimum or maximum number of hours that needs to be on screens. That it’s different for different users and families. The U.S. surgeon general also did an advisory last year and they were talking about the idea about connecting or disconnecting. This is the question that’s on everybody’s mind. It really depends on the purpose. The surgeon general definitely talked about how there’s a lot of concerns about how there is no proof that says that social media doesn’t harm youth as if it—as if it was a product, like that was easily regulated. As we all know, that’s not really the case. But there’s also an urgent need to understand how different populations of social media users use it in different ways, marginalized use. For instance, youth of color or LGBTQ youth. Our studies have shown that they’re significantly more likely to join online groups to reduce social isolation. And not so much Asian American youth, they’re less likely to actually showcase their mental health and wellbeing on social media sites.

And also LGBT youth report that sometimes online friends are even more socially supportive than their offline friends. And so, as you can see, there’s some use, some populations that is—the story isn’t the same across everybody. And we want to be careful about when we say, ‘Oh, they’re on it so much, we need to be worried about them.’ It could be that they’re getting something out of it that is actually promoting their wellbeing. Social context matters—regional differences—for some LGBT youth who have a lot of in real life connections that are positive, they won’t need to lean on social media as much. But for the ones that are in rural places or places that they’re geographically separated from groups that make them feel like a sense of belonging, they might need the social media to really reduce that isolation. LGBT youth are similar in that the BIPOC youth, sometimes the physical space is actually more scary to them than the online space because they could actually get physical—physically harmed in places when they can be themselves. And sometimes identity affirming content is found online not as easy as in real life circumstances. Like maybe you go to a school in which you’re the only—you’re a very vast minority, like you’re only 2 percent of the population and there’s nobody that looks like you. Whether it’s your race, your ethnicity, your immigration status, your body type, you being like neurodivergent. And if you don’t know how to find people like you, sometimes online spaces are the place to be to actually practice some social—social skills. And also the idea that these advisories that come out are thinking of sometimes very traditional family structures in which maybe they’re thinking, oh, everybody has like a two parent family structure in which they’re eager, and willing, and have time to onboard young people with their social media and that’s not always the case. For a lot of—a lot of families, there’s non-traditional family structures, there’s fictive kin. There’s siblings that are onboarding their younger siblings with phone use and social media use. And so all the recommendations should take that into account.

And so my last slide pretty much is about some practical recommendations for caregivers to think about preparing instead of repairing. Our last study about parental monitoring of middle school and early adolescent youth showed that the dialect that you have to pre-warn young people with all the things that could be happening on social media and on technology use are a lot more positive, a lot more powerful kind of predictors of if it’s going to go well or not if they’re going to have problematic internet use. If you kind of wait until something happens and something negative happens, and then you have to start clamping down on their use, it almost is—it’s kind of like hard to treat it after it’s already happened rather than prevent it, like kind of preventative medicine kind of tactics. And so what I wanted to say too as our final takeaways is content and context, what you’re seeing online is just as critical as the amount of time you’re spending it, maybe even more so. Just because somebody’s on it a lot, and you’ve got to find out what is their intention, what is their motivation? Maybe it’s actually really important for them to seeking health information about something that they’re dealing with, for instance.

A lot of times the alarming stats that come out about social media and mental health make parents, and caregivers, and educators think, okay, let’s just not be on it. And let’s just get rid of it. But really, the more realistic thing to say is what can we do on social media, and technology, and digital media that is productive? That is helping us collaborate with other people. Help us network. Help us seek online friends that are supportive and get rid of, and hide, and drop friends that are not making us feel good about ourselves. Develop self-awareness about your limits rather than relying on ready-made, automatic curfews and things that are kind of programmed in an app when you can also, at the same time, work on self-awareness and setting your own limits. And also there’s the village, like I said before. It’s not just parents that could be helping. It could be cousins. It could be aunties, coaches, school counselors, pediatricians. This is all part of the village to help young people understand how to best protect themselves on social media, like, the positives and the negatives. And if you want to look at any of the references, I’ve got them here. They can be shared with you after the fact. There’s all these things that you can go in and look at these advisories and these individual studies if you’d like. And I look forward to the Q&A. Thank you.

[00:27:25]

RICK WEISS: Thank you for that great review of the importance of context in so many dimensions when you’re talking about the connections here with mental health. Especially also really appreciate your reminder to reporters that individual studies are often not that strong or believable all by themselves. That if you are going to report on an individual study in this area, it’ll be important to bring in the context from what previous studies have shown and what the shortcomings or strengths are of each one. Which is something, by the way, SciLine can help you all with if you’re doing that kind of coverage. And so interesting that in the end, such a small percentage of wellbeing might be linked to social media. That’s something we might get into as well. But let’s move along here and get to Dr. Jason Nagata on physical health.

[00:28:12]

JASON NAGATA: Thanks so much for having me. And I’m a pediatrician by training, specializing in the care of adolescents with eating disorders. And I first became interested in social media research when I cared for teenagers who became really lost in disordered eating content related to weight loss or muscle building. And even some of our patients who are hospitalized would use social media to find and share tips on how to continue their disordered eating behaviors in the hospital, despite severe medical complications of their eating disorder. And these experiences really motivated my research into understanding physical health impacts of social media. So in today’s presentation, I’m going to talk about social media screens and physical health, and specifically in the areas of eating disorders, nutrition, weight, physical activity, cardiovascular disease risk, sleep, and other health related behaviors. For most of the studies that I’ll reference today, the data comes from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, which is the largest long-term study of brain development and child health in the United States, following nearly 12,000 9- to 10-year-olds for—until they’re 20 years old. Currently we have data for about 9- to-15 years old, so most of the data will be on early adolescence, across 21 different study sites around the U.S. with lots of measures of social media, screen use, and physical health. And I will say that one of the advantages of this cohort study is that we do have—it’s not just cross-sectional data, as was mentioned before. But we do have annual collection so we can time order the social media exposure prior to the physical health outcome.

So the first study that I wanted to talk about is about screen use and eating disorders which, as I mentioned, is my specialty. And so we found that for every hour of social media use that a 9- to 10-year old used, one year later they had a 62 percent higher odds of binge eating disorder, which involves eating a large amount of food in a short amount of time with associated loss of control and guilt. And there were other modalities like texting, watching TV, as well as total screen time, which were also associated prospectively with development of eating disorder one year later. Now, some of the mechanisms that could link social media to eating disorders could be the constant comparisons to unattainable body ideals, filters, editing, curation, pressure for an individual to display one’s own body in order to gain likes and followers. And I will say that social media is unique to television or movies, and that most teenagers in television and movies are living in a read-only environment. They’re going to consume media, but they’re not generally going to produce it. But on social media, teens are actually pressured to post their own content, which is unique to social media. And then, of course, unfortunately, like I mentioned, for some of our patients, there’s this overt exposure to eating disorder content on social media. One other content area that could be linked to social media is cyber bullying. We do know that in-person bullying traditionally has been known to lead to a higher risk of development of eating disorders. And in the ABCD study we did find that cyber bullying specifically was associated with several eating disorder symptoms, like worry about weight gain, self-worth tied to weight, compensatory behaviors to prevent weight gain, and binge eating.

Now, specifically with binge eating, which involves overeating, we did also find some prospective associations with screen use, and social media use, and weight gain as measured by body mass index, which is one of the measures of obesity, one year later. As was mentioned previously, these are relatively small effect sizes. So while they were statistically significant, each hour of screen use was associated with 0.22 higher BMI. So it’s a relatively small effect but it could accumulate with multiple hours of screen exposure and multiple years of exposure. Now, some of the potential mechanisms that can link screen use and social media use to weight gain and BMI are that adolescents tend to overeat or snack more while they’re distracted in front of screens. They may be exposed to food advertisements. And, in general, people are usually sedentary while they’re watching screens or social media, and this can displace time for physical activity.

One interesting finding that we were interested in studying is the relationship between screens and step count as measured by Fitbit, and how different combinations of categories related to obesity risk in adolescence. And so in this study, higher BMI or higher obesity risk is on the Y axis. And the different screen categories were defined as low, 0-4 hours. Medium, which was 4 to 8 hours of screen use. And high, which was greater than 8 hours of screen use. And then we also made categories of steps. So if, in the dark blue, if the adolescent had more than 12,000 steps per day, medium was the middle blue 6 to 12,000, and then the light blue or whitish is less than 6,000 steps. And what you can see here is that having more steps per day is protective of obesity risk for the low and medium screen time. So up until 8 hours of screen time, more physical activity can be beneficial for eating—for your body mass index or obesity risk. But when we get to the high screen use, so adolescents who are reporting more than 8 hours a day of screen use, the high physical activity doesn’t really seem to offset that obesity risk. So there does seem to be a point at which beyond more than 8 hours of screen use, there may not be beneficial—as much benefit for obesity risk in terms of physical activity. Now, we did also look at a study that started in the 1990s and followed—and has now followed adolescents into adulthood for more than 24 years. And we did find that screen use in teenage years was associated with higher risk of diabetes, higher waist circumference, and higher body mass index 24 year laters in adulthood. And so I think one important thing to note is that some of the cardiovascular effects of screen use in sedentary time may not actually appear as disease or health problems until many decades later.

In this study, back to the ABCD study, so again focusing on 10- to 14-yea-olds, we did find associations between screen time and social media with poorer nutrition as measured by the MIND diet, which is the Mediterranean DASH diet. In general, it’s a heart healthy and brain healthy diet. And we did find that the more screen time and social media time adolescents had, the less likely they were to adhere to the MIND diet. But as I had mentioned before, these are relatively weak effect sizes, but could accumulate over time. The last area that I wanted to talk about was screen use and bedtime. Because we do know that, in general, when you’re on social media or on screens, you’re generally not sleeping. And one of the big effects of social media use could actually be just through displacement of sleep. And so in the ABCD study, almost two thirds of these early adolescents reported that they had an electronic device in their bedroom, and having a device in their bedroom was associated with shorter sleep duration and greater sleep disturbance. And about 17 percent said that they were woken up by notifications in the past week, and that was also associated with more sleep disturbance and shorter sleep duration. So, in general, if you’re going to have a phone, it’s best to have a device outside of your room. But if it is in the room, it’s better to turn it off than to leave it on. And even putting it on off is better than putting it on silent. And we did find that there was a little bit more sleep disturbance, even with people who had notifications off but still had their phone on.

Now, I did want to mention, as has been mentioned before, that screens are not all inherently bad and there may be some benefits. And so one of the interesting things that we found from the ABCD study because it occurred during the pandemic, was that, actually, adolescents who had more social media use in 2020 at—in the first year of the pandemic were actually more likely to have greater masking behaviors. And this was a time before vaccinations when there was still lockdowns and shutdowns, and so teenagers who were on social media were—on average were more likely to adhere to some of the public health guidelines at the time. Now, this was a recent study that was actually just published yesterday, looking at different parenting practices largely modeled off of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Family Media Use Plan to reduce screen use and particularly problematic screen use. And, again, this is really focused on early teenagers, so 12-, 13-, 14-year-olds. But we did find that one of the biggest predictors of adolescent screen use was parent screen use. So I think it’s really important to practice what you preach and model good behavior. Family meal time screening use and bedroom screen use could be times to try to limit screen use, in particular, both for the eating issues that we discussed earlier and also so that it doesn’t displace sleep. And at least in this early adolescent age range, it did seem like more parent monitoring and some limitations were associated with lower screen time and lower problematic use among adolescents.

So, with that, I would like to thank our funders, and lab team, and the different studies that we reported the data from. And, as mentioned—Well, actually today, we just released a question and answer on screens and physical health that kind of summarizes some of the findings from this presentation. And, as I mentioned, that parent monitoring paper was actually just published yesterday and the links to the news releases are there and also the references to the other studies. So thank you so much.

[00:38:24]

RICK WEISS: Fantastic. Thank you. Tons of data for reporters to draw from as you cover this topic and that’s the whole purpose of SciLine. You’re covering this topic because it’s newsworthy, it’s controversial, it’s something people are talking about. What we want to make sure is that as you cover people’s opinions about all this, you’re able to include lots of data as well. And, boy, are you well enriched thanks to our speakers today, and even a news hook with a new study out yesterday. So thank you all for that. We’re going to start the Q&A. I want to remind folks that the slides will be available immediately after the briefing, so you can pull a lot of that data right away when we post that. Before we get into reporters’ questions, I always like to start with these briefings with one quick question from SciLine itself and that is an opportunity for our speakers to speak to reporters as news consumers themselves, who watch the news go by on the topics that they are studying, and have reactions themselves to those stories. And I want to give each of our experts a short opportunity to say something to reporters about either what you really appreciate about the way this topic is covered in the news, or maybe something you wish reporters would do differently or better as you look at the news stories in this area. And I’ll start with you, Colleen.

[00:39:40]

COLLEEN MCCLAIN: Alright, thank you so much. I think I would point to one of the things that I mentioned earlier, which is that social media is not a monolith. Teens’ experiences are not a monolith. And the impact of social media on teens is not all good. It’s not all bad. And I think that came through in all 3 of the presentations today, and I have—I have seen some terrific reporting that really takes that into account. I think throughout the findings that I shared, we really do see the good and the bad. And I am so grateful to Dr. Charmaraman, and I’m so sorry if I pronounced your name incorrectly, for sharing that full chart. I didn’t get a chance to get to all of the findings, but it really is, I’m going to borrow your phrase, a yes and story. Right? So, for example, when we saw the gender differences, we saw teen girls saying, yes, I—these negative impacts, I’m feeling them more. But some of the positive impacts have gender differences as well. And I think one thing I want to point to is that we see this in our other work too. So very recently we put out a report on teens and screen time, looking at a lot of questions on teens and their smartphones. And so this came up in other presentations as well, the real take away from this work is that it is both good and bad. It’s a family issue that teens and their parents are struggling with. We see teens talking about the negatives. Parents worried. But also the vast majority of teens saying for people my age, smartphones provide more benefits than harms. And so—and it certainly depends on what aspect of your life we’re talking about, what specific technology we’re talking about. And I would just underscore really dig into the details as much as you can in a very short, succinct format. We all have a limited space and limited time, but I think really the value is in the nuance of teens’ experiences today.

[00:41:45]

RICK WEISS: Great. Thank you. And Dr. Charmaraman.

[00:41:49]

LINDA CHARMARAMAN: Oh, I am definitely a plus one on so much what you just said, Colleen, about the value of the teens’ experiences. And all the nuanced coverage that the reporters have been doing to try to piece together what the story is, that it’s not monolithic across whether it’s teens’ experiences or just social media sites themselves. And also just the idea of separating social media from screen time too. That also is something that often gets a little bit kind of glossed over a little bit. And I think one thing I would love, if I could—if I could be a fly on the wall when there are news stories about to come out that are based on the premise of, oh, there’s been—there’s a crisis in mental health. It’s going up like this on the graph and also social media use is going up like this. Oh my gosh, they have to be connected. And it’s just common sense. That kind of story that starts with that basis feels—it’s a lot more speculative. There’s some studies that can show some of those positive associations, but not in every way. Like maybe it’s on anxiety but not depression. Or it’s on loneliness but not on social anxiety. Or—it’s not as simple of a story to explain the increase of social—increase of mental health issues. It’s one of those million dollar questions. If we knew how to fix the mental health crisis, we wish it was as easy as let’s just get them off their phones. It’s such a much more complex story to tell.

[00:43:26]

RICK WEISS: Fantastic. Correlation is not causation. Dr. Nagata.

[00:43:33]

JASON NAGATA: Yeah. Thank you so much. And I really echo what has been said before in that there is a lot of nuance in social media, and trends, and effects. And so I think it’s really important that we think about different subpopulations by gender, or sexual orientation, or gender identity and how that might really differ and to not leave some marginalized groups out of the story. And I think one example of that is in the eating disorder field, a lot of media coverage has been about social media, and body image, and eating disorders, particularly in girls. But I think there’s very little coverage on how it affects boys. And actually there are like—there’s a lot of nuance in that. And actually that’s one of the areas that I have dedicated my eating disorders research into. But there’s actually a lot of pressures for muscularity, and muscle building content, and fitness, and exercise stuff that’s on social media that can actually lead to a lot of pressures for boys that I think are just really glossed over in the media. And so I think it’s important to think about how it might differ for different populations. And there are, I think, really interesting stories that sometimes don’t get the main—in the main header. So, I do think that that kind of nuance is really important. And, as mentioned before, like for sexual and gender minorities or LGBT youth. There are a lot of ways that a rural LGBT youth in a community where they may be the only person who’s out in their entire middle school or high school, can really get a lot of connection online. And so I do think that it really does matter for context. And, finally, I’d just like to thank everyone for the coverage of this. I think it’s a really important topic and there’s so much legislation right now and so little data, that it’s—all of the coverage that is on this that can help inform parents—and I think a lot of parents actually have a lot of decisions that, without a lot of data and guidance that they’re making. And so I do think that covering it from the angle of like what families, and parents can—and pediatricians, and teachers can do is really helpful.

[00:45:41]

RICK WEISS: Fantastic. And the first question I’m going to turn to from a reporter actually addresses that need for data. This is from freelance reporter David Beckemeyer. The platforms shutting down access to researchers limits our ability to understand these platforms. Such as Facebook shutting down CrowdTangle. Twitter, X, cutting off access to Firehose, etc. TikTok is a black box as well. Please comment on this transparency issue and how it affects your ability to do your work. Does anyone want to take that first?

[00:46:17]

COLLEEN MCCLAIN: I can just briefly chime in and say that this is among the many reasons that we see so much value in talking to teens themselves, right? So we have—we’re presenting on their self-reported experiences and views. And in an environment when it is really difficult to get a lot of different types of data for some of the reasons you mention, having these really strong rigorous surveys is critical to the public discourse. And so that’s part of our mission at Pew Research Center. I would say that we do have some studies that—at the center that are using other types of data than survey data and this is a big part of the conversation around what data can be accessed and how it can be used.

[00:47:08]

RICK WEISS: Jason?

[00:47:13]

JASON NAGATA: I’ll just chime in that I completely agree. And, actually, one of the other big reports that came out in the past year was from the National Academy of Medicine on social media and impacts on adolescent health. And I think their main conclusion was, actually, that there is not enough evidence or data to really make recommendations. And the reason for that is that we don’t have access to the data—the richest data source is from the social media and tech companies themselves, which are generally proprietary and private. And so their actual conclusion was that Congress or legislators should mandate that—that some of this data be released to independent scientists so that we can have a little bit more understanding of some of these nuances. And so I do think that that is potentially some legislation that could be proposed in the future is it’s maybe not in company’s best interest to release it. But that, in order to really understand it and to have the richness of data to really be able to understand time ordering and some of these nuances, the best sources of data actually come from the tech companies and there might need to be some regulation for that.

[00:48:18]

LINDA CHARMARAMAN: Yes, I absolutely agree with both of you about the richness and the vastness of that humongous data set that these companies have a hold of. I might—I might be saying something a little bit unpopular here right now, is that most of that data is big data that only certain researchers actually know how to analyze big, huge data sets. It’s also very quantitative. It’s about likes, and time sequence, and counting, as opposed to qualitative data. Unless you content analyze, trying to get at what they’re trying to—what’s the motivation behind their posts. But this is where self-report actually comes in as a win, that we actually need reasons why people are on social media and what’s the background to this post. Rather than just us researcher identifying, like coding people’s posts and not knowing really what was the history behind it. And so even if we got access, let me just say, to all those data sets, it still doesn’t give us the entire story of—like before they went on social media, we don’t know anything about them. That’s why we need these longitudinal studies tracking people before they even go on social media. And that’s what social media companies don’t have. Like, we have that, as researchers, the pre-data to see any changes in in later years. And so I think a combination of access to the big data but also working with independent scientists with their own data sets that can go into the nuances of the how, and the why, and the when, and the where, and all that—all that stuff.

[00:49:53]

RICK WEISS: So, that all sounds like a very difficult challenge, but it obviously hasn’t stopped people in Washington from proposing legislation in this area. And that’s the topic of our next question from Daniel Chang at KFF News. Can you comment on the abundance of legislation considered by states in 2023 relating to social media and children? That’s right. This is on the state level, this question. What policies do you think will be effective or helpful for children or what do you think might be harmful for kids? Now, I know you folks are all scientists and not policymakers per se, but this is a chance to weigh in on whether you think that there are data to support some kind of policy leanings? Or do you have any kind of thoughts that you’d want to pass along to legislators as they think about these kinds of things? Tricky area.

[00:50:46]

LINDA CHARMARAMAN: Yeah.

[00:50:46]

COLLEEN MCCLAIN: I can chime in with some data that we have on related topics. So we—it’s not exactly in the context of social media. But in thinking about children and their online privacy, we have some data from a recent survey that asks people, and this is among U.S. adults overall, who should be responsible for protecting children’s online privacy? And, of course, this is only one part of the conversation. This is not so much mental health and physical health. And I think one of the really striking findings is that the vast majority of people say parents have a great deal of responsibility for this. But the—a majority also say tech companies have a responsibility for this. A great deal of responsibility. And nearly half say the government has a great deal of responsibility for this. So certainly in those circles, we’re seeing this sense of a responsibility that this needs to happen. And I’d love to hear from other panelists if you have more to say on the mental and physical health space as well.

[00:51:56]

JASON NAGATA: I can chime in. I’ll start with an easy one, which is that there is some legislation to fund more research on the topic and that I am definitely in support of. So the Children And Media Research Advancement Act, or the CAMRA Act, went into effect in 2023, which provides more NIH funding, or National Institutes of Health funding, for research on adolescent social media and mental health. But for some of the more challenging policies like, Utah, for instance, I think was the first state to implement more robust age verification for social media. And then parental consent for a minor to actually open and maintain an account. So I think that that will actually be a very interesting test. Because, technically, the minimum age for social media is 13, but what we found from the ABCD study is many 9- and 10-year-olds have accounts. But there is not really currently a good way of checking. Anybody can just lie about their age and get into an account. And so with that legislation, supposedly, there’s more robust ways that you have to show your ID or have a parent—and so it’ll be interesting, I think, to see how they play out. And yeah, as researchers, I don’t think that we have answers to necessarily what’s going to be most effective. But I will say that since some of these policies—like, that law has passed. I think it will be really interesting to actually just study how it changes at those States and if these robust aid verification of parent monitoring and consent actually makes a difference for the adolescents in those states.

[00:53:28]

LINDA CHARMARAMAN: Yes. Yes, and Dr. Nagata was mentioning the influx of new funding. A lot of people don’t know that the priorities in age has set, in the last 10, 20 years, often in their—in their kind of mission statements, media screen time, social media was not on the radar. Like, it was not a priority. It was not in their list of key things. Not until pretty recently. And, actually, it took some of those Facebook leaks kinds of stories to actually get lawmakers to actually care about it. NIH was like, ‘Oh, this is a thing. It’s not just a marginal topic. Maybe we should actually have specific calls for this kind—these kinds of studies.’ And so because of the fact that it’s kind of delayed reaction, after like the start of social media, it’s going to take a while for it to catch up to having to be—having access to data that is over time launched. And really set some of those recommendations. And I would say one of the things that would be helpful in terms of enacting these policy changes would be that it would be not social media platform specific, it would just be all kinds of—any company collecting data on users of a certain age need to have—abide by the same rules. To me, that would be a lot less—It just would be easier to enforce too, instead of, like, oh, this company, oh they’re kind of in our mind safer so we’re not going to impose it on there. But this company is—we don’t like how they’re using their data. And so it should just be a blanket and kind of age thing. And kind of legislation talking about advertising. People are talking about social media companies a lot and about phone companies, but how about advertisers? What are they doing to help improve youth wellbeing in the kind of same thing that they’re trying to make money. They’re the ones that are funding the things that are being pushed on the feeds and the algorithms. And so they also could be people that we could try to get some regulations on to improve mental health on social media too.

[00:55:38]

COLLEEN MCCLAIN: If I can just follow up on that. I will note that we see high levels of concern among the American public, both with regard to what social media companies know about children and what advertisers are tracking. And so I think public concern really supports that. And I think, in that last slide I shared, we saw in the public supports social media companies implementing these restrictions. I mean, this is the vast majority of U.S. adults who say social media companies should require parental consent. They should require age verification. They should set limits. And so I think that’s a really important point to keep in mind here.

[00:56:16]

RICK WEISS: Well, it will be interesting to see how those demands get translated into legislation. It’s not always a perfect process. We’re just about at the top of the hour. I wanted to try to squeeze in one more question, but first want to remind reporters on the line that when you do log off at the end of this briefing, you will be confronted by a very short survey that I very much hope you will take a minute to fill out. That’s all it will take. It helps us design these briefings in ways that can be most useful to you. We really appreciate you taking that extra minute to do that. I do want to squeeze in one question here from Ellen Barry at the New York Times. Since these studies that you all have been talking about have mostly been observational studies, correlations, not able to prove causation. And she is asking whether there are any high quality, randomized control studies looking at social media and smartphone bans in schools, which would actually perhaps have the—be at least designed in a way, of course, that might be able to point to causality. Do any—are any of you familiar with any RCTs in this domain?

[00:57:20]

LINDA CHARMARAMAN: I’m not familiar with any phone bans, especially in schools. It’s a very specific kind of thing that you’re looking for. But I know in Massachusetts there is some talk of the Attorney General and the Massachusetts Surgeon General to really have a more evidence-based guideline for phone use in the schools. And they’re trying to collect more data. And it’s something that is of interest, I think, to policymakers now. Not just every school district do their own thing and every principal has their own rule kind of a thing. So it would be nice to have some kind of guideline. Just like parents don’t know what they—what they’re doing in terms of data out there, but also schools are kind of trying to figure out on their own as well.

[00:58:01]

JASON NAGATA: Yeah, I’m also not aware of exact studies on the school ban specifically. But I have done a little review of abstinence intervention, so the complete cessation of social media. And there have been mixed results on individuals trying to completely become abstinent with social media, meaning that some have found improvements, but some have found no association. So I think it’s kind of mixed with at least total abstinence. My guess is that for abstinence on a school level, it may be similar. It may work in some contexts, but perhaps not all.

[00:58:33]

RICK WEISS: Well, wouldn’t it be great if as policies get experimented with and enacted, they keep in mind the opportunity to gather some useful data along the way as we go. We are out of time and I just want to give great thanks to all 3 of our presenters today. We’ve been shown so much actual scientific data and heard fantastic science-based context from you all, which is exactly what we’re all about here. Thank you for your participation today. And thanks to you reporters who attended today and for your commitment to including science in your coverage and remembering that it’s always helpful to add that scientific data-based context to your stories as you cover the issues that people care about today. Thank you all so much. And we’ll see you at the next SciLine media briefing. So long.