Does restricting social media help teens? We finally get some evidence

A world-first study will test whether reducing the time teenagers spend on social media actually improves their mental health. However, the results won’t be available until mid-2027, by which time other governments may have introduced complete bans on social media for teenagers.

The court will not tell us whether such prohibitions are worthwhile; robust evidence for this is lacking, but Australia has already introduced one for under-16s and the UK government is launching a consultation to a similar movement.

The trial focuses on the young people themselves, including consultation with them about the intervention to be tested. To date, children and teenagers are excluded from social media design and management discussions.

“Kids absolutely need to be a part of this conversation,” she says Pete Etchells at Bath Spa University in the United Kingdom, who is not involved in the study.

“There is a lot of evidence that social media is harming individual children and adolescents, including very serious harm,” he says Amy Orben at the University of Cambridge, who is co-leading the process. What’s less clear, he says, is “whether time spent on social media has an impact on the wider population of young people”.

Answering that requires large-scale controlled research, so Orben and her colleagues are launching IRL Trial in Bradford, UK. The goal is to recruit about 4,000 12- to 15-year-olds from 10 schools. All participants will install a customized app on their phones that will track their social media usage.

For half of them, the app will also limit time on select social media apps, including TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, but not messaging apps like WhatsApp. “They can only use all these apps together for one hour and they also have a night curfew where they can’t use them… between 9pm and 7am,” he says Dan Lewer at the Bradford Center for Health Data Science, who is also co-leading the study. That represents a significant cut, he says. “The average daily screen time in this age group, 12 to 15, is around 3 hours a day,” says Lewer. The other half of teens will be able to continue using social media as usual.

Crucially, children will be randomly assigned by grade level, meaning that in a given school, Year 8 may be the control group, while Year 9 are restricted in their use of social media. The aim is to ensure that groups of children experience the same conditions as possible. “If you removed or limited one child’s use of social media, but their friend group was still online after 9 p.m., they might feel like they’re missing out,” says Orben.

Lewer says the study was designed in collaboration with teenagers. “They didn’t want us to test a total ban,” he says.

The full study will run for six weeks around October, and the researchers expect to publish the first results in mid-2027.

The trial should provide more accurate information than we currently have about how many teens use social media and when, because it will be tracked through the app rather than relying on self-reports, Orben says. The team will also collect data on anxiety, sleep quality, time spent with friends and family, well-being, body image, social comparison, school absences and bullying.

It’s crucial to find out whether limiting or banning social media will help or hurt young people, says Etchells. “The honest answer is we don’t know, which is why studies like this are so important.”

But the complete lack of quality research to date makes this study very welcome. This was underlined by a recent news from the UK’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, which highlighted “a lack of high-quality causal evidence linking children’s mental health and wellbeing and their use of digital technologies, specifically social media, smartphones and AI chatbots”.

According to him, working with young people is key in social media research Margarita Panayiotou at the University of Manchester in the UK. For example, the choice to test restrictions instead of an outright ban is more functional, she says, because teens in the studies she’s conducted have readily described how they would work around such bans. This approach may also be more ethical because we don’t know if bans would cause harm, he says.

“[Teens] find social media as a useful space to understand oneself,” says Panayiotou. But that doesn’t mean young people also see its disadvantages. “They also talk about not trusting the platforms themselves” and “losing control … they find themselves on social media without realizing it.” Adolescents also reported problems such as fear of being judged online, as well as body comparisons and cyberbullying.

The challenge for governments, Etchells and Panayiotou say, is to force tech companies to make social media safer and healthier for young people.

The Online Safety Act 2023 (OSA) has provisions that require tech companies like TikTok, Meta — the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram — and Google — which owns YouTube — take more responsibility for the safety of users. “If the compliance elements of OSA were actually properly enforced, I think it would go some way to solving some of the problems we already have,” says Etchells.

topics:

• mental health/
• social media