13.1. Social Media Influence on Mental Health#

In 2019 the company Facebook (now called Meta) presented an internal study that found that Instagram was bad for the mental health of teenage girls, and yet they still allowed teenage girls to use Instagram.

So, what does social media do to the mental health of teenage girls, and to all it’s other users?

The answer is of course complicated and varies. Some have argued that Facebook’s own data is not as conclusive as you think about teens and mental health.

Many have anecdotal experience with their own mental health and those they talk to. For example cosmetic surgeons have seen how photo manipulation on social media has influenced people’s views of their appearance:

People historically came to cosmetic surgeons with photos of celebrities whose features they hoped to emulate. Now, they’re coming with edited selfies. They want to bring to life the version of themselves that they curate through apps like FaceTune and Snapchat.

Comedian and director Bo Burnham has his own observations as well:

“If [social media] was just bad, I’d just tell all the kids to throw their phone in the ocean, and it’d be really easy. The problem is it - we are hyper-connected, and we’re lonely. We’re overstimulated, and we’re numb. We’re expressing our self, and we’re objectifying ourselves. So I think it just sort of widens and deepens the experiences of what kids are going through.

But in regards to social anxiety, social anxiety - there’s a part of social anxiety I think that feels like you’re a little bit disassociated from yourself. And it’s sort of like you’re in a situation, but you’re also floating above yourself, watching yourself in that situation, judging it. And social media literally is that. You know, it forces kids to not just live their experience but be nostalgic for their experience while they’re living it, watch people watch them, watch people watch them watch them.

My sort of impulse is like when the 13 year olds of today grow up to be social scientists, I’ll be very curious to hear what they have to say about it. But until then, it just feels like we just need to gather the data.”

It can be difficult to measure the effects of social media on mental health since there are so many types of social media, and it permeates our cultures even of people who don’t use it directly.

Some researchers have found that people using social media may enter a dissociation state, where they lose track of time (like what happens when someone is reading a good book).

Researchers at Facebook decided to try to measure how their recommendation algorithm was influencing people’s mental health. So they changed their recommendation algorithm to show some people more negative posts and some people more positive posts. They found that people who were given more negative posts tended to post more negatively themselves. Now, this while experiment was done without informing users that they were part of an experiment, and when people found out that they might be part of a secret mood manipulation experiment, they were upset.