I know that we’ve already pointed to a whole bunch of studies, using a variety of different methods that all show no evidence of any link at all between social media and teen depression, but it’s time to highlight another one.
I mean, we just interviewed Professor Andy Przybylski, who published a study showing no evidence that Facebook and Facebook Messenger increase depression. That one comes four years after another study by him that showed no evidence that social media was making kids unhappy. In between then there have been a bunch of other studies. By 2020, the academic consensus appeared to be that social media wasn’t actually bad for kids. More recently, the American Psychological Association did a meta analysis of all the studies on this topic and said there was no evidence of a harmful link between social media and teen depression. Pew Research did a study showing that most kids found social media to be tremendously beneficial.
Even the Surgeon General’s recent report on social media — which has been widely reported by the media to say that social media was bad for kids — actually admitted that studies could find no link between mental health problems and social media. It still recommended acting as if there was a link just in case, but that seemed at odds with what the report admitted the science actually said.
Anyway, now we have yet another study on this subject, looking specifically at children in Norway, where (yet again) they can find no link between social media and depression. You can read the whole study if you’d like the details. The results are clear:
Within-person changes in self- and other oriented social media behavior were unrelated to within-person changes in symptoms of depression or anxiety two years later, and vice versa. This null finding was evident across all timepoints and for both sexes. Conclusions: The frequency of posting, liking, and commenting is unrelated to future symptoms of depression and anxiety. This is true also when gold standard measures of depression and anxiety are applied.
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