You mean the same social media companies that
want this legislation and wrote it themselves? The same legislation that introduces
more surveillance and tracking for everyone, including kids?
Also, I heard the same thing about video games, TV shows, D&D, texting and even youth novels. It's yet another moral panic.
From the Guardian[1]:
> Social media time does not increase teenagers’ mental health problems – study
> Research finds no evidence heavier social media use or more gaming increases symptoms of anxiety or depression
> Screen time spent gaming or on social media does not cause mental health problems in teenagers, according to a large-scale study.
> With ministers in the UK considering whether to follow Australia’s example by banning social media use for under-16s, the findings challenge concerns that long periods spent gaming or scrolling TikTok or Instagram are driving an increase in teenagers’ depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions.
> Researchers at the University of Manchester followed 25,000 11- to 14-year-olds over three school years, tracking their self-reported social media habits, gaming frequency and emotional difficulties to find out whether technology use genuinely predicted later mental health difficulties.
From Nature[2]:
> Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health
From the Atlantic[3] with citations in the article:
> The Panic Over Smartphones Doesn’t Help Teens, It may only make things worse.
> I am a developmental psychologist[4], and for the past 20 years, I have worked to identify how children develop mental illnesses. Since 2008, I have studied 10-to-15-year-olds using their mobile phones, with the goal of testing how a wide range of their daily experiences, including their digital-technology use, influences their mental health. My colleagues and I have repeatedly failed to find[5] compelling support for the claim that digital-technology use is a major contributor to adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms.
> Many other researchers have found the same[6]. In fact, a recent[6] study and a review of research[7] on social media and depression concluded that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting adolescents’ mental health. The most influential factors include a family history of mental disorder; early exposure to adversity, such as violence and discrimination; and school- and family-related stressors, among others. At the end of last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report[8] concluding, “Available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.”
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/14/social-media-t...
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/05/candi...
[4] https://adaptlab.org/
[5] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31929951/
[6] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7#:~:text=G...
[7] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32734903/
[8] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/27396/Highlights_...