The first of several trials set for this year concerning the alleged addictiveness of social media and its effects on the mental health of young people began this month in Los Angeles, reports PBS News.
A 19-year-old woman referred to as “K.G.M.” claims that early social media exposure, coupled with the failure of social media companies to provide adequate safeguards to protect children, resulted in her compulsive use of social media as a child and a decline in mental health.
Google, Meta, Snap, and TikTok were originally named in the lawsuit, although Snap and TikTok have since agreed to settlements. K.G.M.’s case is part of a consolidated group of cases that includes thousands of plaintiffs, PBS News reported.
Mental Health Concerns
The extent to which social media impacts the mental health of young people remains a matter of debate among mental health professionals and researchers.
Social media entered kids’ lives around 2010, and its use increased as the ubiquity of smartphones grew.
Rates of anxiety and depression among young people went up around the same time while rates of self-harm and suicidality, which were already seeing an uptick, continued to rise, says Kristopher Kaliebe, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at the University of South Florida, who has co-authored academic papers on the topic and provided written reports to the states of Georgia and Tennessee regarding relevant state laws.
“We have some sort of global numbers that point to a potential association, and so that is something to take quite seriously,” said Kaliebe, adding there are also several psychiatric disorders with clear links to social media, including dissociative identity presentations, tic disorders, body dysmorphic disorder, eating disorders, and potentially gender dysphoria.
Overuse Concerns
The way major social media platforms operate also provides reason for concern, says Kaliebe.
“The companies have a lot of capability to figure out people’s interests and provide those things that stimulate them,” said Kaliebe, adding that this can create negative outcomes for children on a multitude of levels.
“The rapid succession in the constantly changing screens can impact focus and attention,” said Kaliebe. “There seems to be some global decline in grades and academic performance, also associated with that.”
Flawed Intuition
The psychological effects of various forms of entertainment, media, and social media are overblown, says Christopher Ferguson, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Stetson University, who researches this specific area.
“The essence of the public narrative is really this distinction between what feels intuitive for people versus what we have data to support,” Ferguson told Health Care News.
People intuitively feel their children spend a lot of time on social media, they hear stories about rates of mental health problems increasing among minors, and they connect the two, says Ferguson, adding similar patterns have occurred with video games, Dungeons and Dragons, rock music, comic books, the radio, the regular phone, and even kaleidoscopes if you go far enough back.
“These things come out, and we tend to view kids as being sort of debauched or damaged,” said Ferguson. “There seems to be this natural intuition that we worry about kids and then tend to ascribe [what we are worried about] to whatever the kids are doing, which we already don’t understand or don’t like,” said Ferguson.
Flawed Studies
Moreover, the data linking social media to the declining mental health of minors is not very strong. Experimental studies tend not to provide much support for concerns about children’s social media use, says Ferguson.
The results of those studies are “heterogeneous,” says Ferguson. “When you combine them in a meta-analysis, there is no clear evidence that reducing social media can have an effect,” said Ferguson.
Furthermore, says Ferguson, these types of studies tend to suffer from serious flaws.
“You take these people who’ve been exposed to news media for years now, warning them about how bad social media is or smart phones are…then you give them these instructions to not use social media…for two weeks or three weeks or a month or whatever, and then after that you ask them how they feel,” said Ferguson.
It is obvious to the participants what the hypotheses are in these studies, and this may influence the responses they provide, says Ferguson.
Flawed Reasoning
As for arguments that a correlation exists between social media use and mental health problems in young people, says Ferguson, such perceptions likely result from flawed reasoning and unconscious cognitive biases.
One example is The Anxious Generation, a New York Times best-seller by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Haidt sees a pattern in ecological data and ascribes a cause to it, says Ferguson. “…which is literally what we tell people not to do in Psych 101.”
When looking at such data, people are also prone to a “negativity bias,” says Ferguson. “During the 2010s, there was this increase in youth suicides…and people sort of ascribed that to social media use,” said Ferguson.
At the time, there were massive declines in violent crime, teen pregnancy, and school dropouts, which no one attributed to social media, says Ferguson.
“I’m not saying any of that’s causal,” said Ferguson. “Probably none of that’s causal [but] this is the problem with looking for correlations in this sort of ecological data.”
Susceptible Subpopulations
When asked about some of Ferguson’s critiques of the evidence linking social media and declines in the mental health of minors, Kaliebe says he acknowledges the difficulty in proving causation or the strength of proof, but that doesn’t mean social media is harmless.
“You likely have certain developmental windows when technology may have a bigger effect,” said Kaliebe.
Children who have various personal challenges may be more susceptible, says Kaliebe.
“If you look at the kids with autism, ADHD, depression, anxiety, psychiatric disorders, neurocognitive issues, or family, resource, and social issues, those kids are susceptible to being amongst the pool that become the heavy users, and then the heavy users suffer more impact,” said Kaliebe.
Daniel Nuccio, Ph.D. ([email protected]) is a spring 2026 College Fix journalism fellow, reporter, and editorial associate for Health Care News.
