As govts push for teen social media bans, scientific debate erupts

Part of the reason for so much debate is that experiments that have people reducing their social media use produce varied results.

- Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz and Matthew B. Jane

As governments worldwide move to restrict teenagers' access to smartphones and social media, a fierce scientific debate has erupted over whether these digital technologies actually harm young people's mental health.

The controversy, sparked by an influential recent book blaming phones for rising youth anxiety, has exposed deep uncertainties in the research evidence—even as policymakers from the US state of Arkansas to Australia forge ahead with sweeping bans and restrictions.

CONTROVERSY TIMELINE

In March, New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published a popular science book called The Anxious Generation. This blames a rise in youth mental illness over the past 15 years or so on the advent of smartphones and social media.

One early review of Dr. Haidt's book by Duke University psychological scientist Candice Odgers, published in Nature, voiced a common criticism among expert readers: While social media is sometimes associated with bad outcomes, we don't know if it causes those bad outcomes.

In April, Dr. Haidt responded that some recent experimental studies, where researchers got people to reduce their social media use, showed a benefit.

In May, Stetson University psychologist Christopher Ferguson published a "meta-analysis" of dozens of social media experiments and found, overall, that reducing social media use had no impact on mental health.

Next, in August, Dr. Haidt and his colleague Zach Rausch published a blog post arguing that Dr. Ferguson's methods were flawed. They said doing the meta-analysis in a different way showed social media really did affect mental health.

Not long afterwards, one of us (Matthew B. Jane) published his own blog post, pointing out issues in Dr. Ferguson's original meta-analysis but showing Dr. Haidt and Dr. Rausch's re-analysis was also faulty.