Improving Social Media Experiences

By now this is a familiar story. During the early years of the century, a new communication tool surges in popularity. The new tool is not just entertaining; advocates expect it to promote commerce, alleviate loneliness, bridge cultural divides, and spread democracy. But, from the beginning, the tool is controversial. Critics fret about people spending less time together in person, conversations becoming gossipy and rude, and private information being leaked. At best, the new tool is considered a mixed blessing. At worst, it's expected to destroy civilization.

I'm referring here to the telephone. In his 1994 book America Calling, Claude Fischer describes public reactions to the earliest phones, not realizing that what he wrote would soon apply to the social media platforms on the verge of transforming interpersonal communication.

At the end of this newsletter I'll say more about parallels between phones and social media platforms. One of the many differences between these tools is that by the time the platforms came online, social scientists were already skilled at extracting useful information from large datasets. As social media expanded, so did our knowledge of how it changed us. Public concerns both drove and were driven by data.

Last week I touched on some of that data. Jonathan Haidt, in his new bestseller The Anxious Generation, claims that smart phone-based social media use has increasingly undermined adolescent mental health since the early 2010s. However, most scholars find the evidence both inconsistent and mixed: As far as we can tell, social media use has little or no overall impact on mental health, although individual users may experience harms and/or benefits.

A fundamental problem with Haidt's thesis is his attempt to link social media in general to mental health in general. There are many kinds of platforms, many ways to use each platform, and many kinds of users. As the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) concludes,

"it is hard to offer an overall summary of the relationship between social media and mental health beyond observing that the effects, both helpful and harmful, accrue differently to different users."

In this newsletter I want share two new studies illustrating the mixed impacts of social media use. Each study demonstrates the importance of exploring individual experiences, and each offers insights on how we might support young people (and to some extent folks of any age). At the end I'll discuss some specific recommendations for improving social media experiences.

The double-edged sword: A NORC survey

My starting point is a report released last week by Commonsense Media, in collaboration with HopeLab and researchers at University of Chicago's NORC (formerly the National Opinion Research Center, a leading source of national survey data).

This report is grounded in the premise that "we need to listen to and honor the experiences of youth themselves." The researchers not only surveyed young people about their experiences; they also invited 25 youth to help with survey design, and, after the data were in, they gathered suggestions from 39 more young people on how to interpret the findings.

I find this refreshing. The scholars who view social media as categorically harmful to young people (Jonathan Haidt, Jean Twenge, Zach Rausch, etc.) tend to focus on broad social trends and generational differences at the expense of individual-level data and input.

The NORC researchers surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,274 14- through 22-year-olds. Participants were asked about the frequency and purpose of their social media use, the content they encounter, and what their experiences are like. The data were organized by ethnic/racial group, gender, sexual orientation, and mental health.

The report contains a lot of data. Literally hundreds of percentages. Here are what I consider the five most important takeaways:

1. Social media is a mixed experience for young people.

Much of what disturbs people about social media is on display here. For instance, here are responses to four questions presented in the form "Do you agree or disagree with the following statement about social media use?"

— 49% of participants agreed that "I feel like I can't control my use or end up using it for a longer period of time than I originally wanted to."

— 46% agreed that "Using social media takes time away from other activities I care about, like spending time with friends, exercise, or other offline interests." 

— 46% agreed that "Using social media has reduced my "attention span"or ability to concentrate, such as at school or when reading."

— 39% agreed that "I see or hear things on social media that make me feel bad about my body or appearance."

Findings like these make for grim headlines and fear-mongering ("Half of teens say they can't control their social media use"), and I do think there's cause here for concern. At the same time, some context is needed for these statistics:

(a) Over half of young people are not agreeing that these expressions of harm apply to them.

(b) The extent of social media's harmfulness is hard to discern here. Because the question format is agree/disagree, respondents who experience these things once in a while are mixed with those who experience them daily. Plus we can't tell how social media use compares to other activities. Some people also watch more Netflix than they want, and what they see may make them feel bad about their bodies. My point isn't that social media is harmless; we just can't tell how harmful it is compared to other influences.

(c) Social media can be beneficial. For instance, consider the percentages of NORC respondents who view social media as "somewhat" or "very" important for the following activities:

— 85% said that social media is important for "communicating with friends".

— 83% said that it's important for "relaxing or unwinding when stressed".

— 70% said it's important for "getting inspiration from others".

— 68% said it's important for "expressing yourself creatively".

— 55% said it's important for "feeling less alone ".

— 54% said it's important for "getting support or advice when you need it".

Naturally, one doesn't need social media for any of these activities. The data doesn't tell us exactly how beneficial social media is, any more than we can gauge the severity of its harms. The point is simply that both harms and benefits occur. As I noted last week, this is consistent with a number of studies and meta-analyses, and it's one reason why restrictions on social media use should be implemented cautiously.

2. Social media experiences differ from group to group.

The NORC survey reveals many differences among demographic groups. Here's a sampling of some of the larger ones:

— Girls are almost twice as likely as boys to have encountered social media content that makes them feel bad about their body or appearance (50% vs. 26%, respectively).

— Minority youth are twice as likely as White youth to have permanently closed a social media account owing to harassment (42% of Black youth, 40% of Latinos, 21% of Whites).

— LGBTQ+ youth are more likely to encounter both positive and negative comments related to their identities. For instance, 89% have seen comments that affirm LGBTQ+ identities, 76% have seen homophobic comments, and 75% have seen transphobic comments. (The percentages for non-LGBTQ+ youth are 58%, 56%, and 55%, respectively.)

— Young people experiencing moderate to severe depressive symptoms are just over twice as likely to say that they encounter social media content that makes them feel bad about how they look (the actual figure is 60%, as opposed to 25% of youth with no symptoms who report this experience).

These and other differences suggest that support for improving the social media experiences of users should be sensitive to groups as well as individuals.

3. Many young people are aware of the risks of social media and are actively managing them.

Critics of social media often depict young people as passive consumers, drawn to the platforms by a craving for attention, manipulated by the reactions of other users, and exploited by black-box algorithms.

The NORC data adds nuance to this cartoonish view. Here are some responses to questions of the form "In the past 12 months, how often have you engaged in the following behaviors on social media?"

— 63% of participants acknowledged having "taken a temporary break from a social media account so that you wouldn't be tempted to spend so much time on it". (41% acknowledged having permanently closed an account.)

— 76% had "tried to see less of what you dislike".

— 67% had "tried to "curate" your feed."

This is not to say that social media isn't addictive or that it doesn't contribute to passivity. The point is simply that most young people are not engaging mindlessly (at least not all of the time). We can't offer them support under the assumption that they haven't already been trying to support themselves.

4. Few generalizations about social media apply to everyone.

It's hard to sort through the hundreds of percentages given in this report, but here's a detail that jumps out: Almost none of those percentages exceed 80%. (I estimate that well under 1% of them exceed that value.)

This is vitally important, because it suggests that almost any generalization we make about social media is going to fail to apply to at least 1 in 5 youth.

Here again, the implication is that anything we might do to help improve the social media experience of young users needs to be tailored to individuals.

Why this is not the end of the story

The NORC survey highlights the richness and diversity of young peoples' social media experience, but it doesn't tell us everything we need to know.

For one thing, participants were surveyed on just one occasion, making it difficult to know how their use of social media evolved and influenced their behavior and emotional well-being from year to year. What we need is longitudinal data tracking individuals over time. Happily, there's a new study that does just that.

Mixed social effects: A Norwegian study

In the July edition of Computers in Human Behavior, now available online, Dr. Silje Steinsbekk at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and her colleagues gathered data from 812 participants every two years from ages 10 through 18. Following are three of the key variables:

— Social media use was defined as monthly frequency of likes, comments, and posts, as reported by each participant. (The researchers don't identify which platforms participants used.)

— Social skills were rated by parents using well-validated scales that explore the dimensions of cooperation, assertion, self-control, and responsibility.

— Time spent with friends offline was measured by asking how many days during the previous week the participant had been with friends either in someone's home or out for the majority of an afternoon or evening.

For each of these variables, correlations over time were not large. In other words, kids varied a lot from one testing period to the next in social media use, social skills, and time spent with friends.

Here are two of the main findings:

1. Overall, social media use was unrelated to future social skills.

In other words, social media use at each age (10, 12, 14, etc.) was not significantly correlated with social skills at a later age (12, 14, 16, etc.).

This is news. Critics say that social media use diminishes social skills (Haidt: "We can't expect children and adolescents to develop adult-level real-world social skills when their social interactions are largely happening in the virtual world"). Advocates argue instead that social media platforms give kids the opportunity to practice social skills. The data here doesn't quite support either view.

At the same time, among participants with high scores on a measure of social anxiety, greater social media did predict poorer social skills. The effect was small, but it reminds us to avoid describing social media effects in general without considering differences among subgroups of users.

(b) Social media use predicted amount of time spent with friends offline.

In other words, social media use at each age was significantly correlated with offline time with friends, both at the same age and at future testings. However, time spent offline with friends did not predict future social media use.

For example, the more kids used social media at age 12, the more time they spent with friends at age 14. However, the amount of time they spent with friends at age 12 was unrelated to how much they used social media at age 14.

This is also news, because critics say that social media use displaces offline, real-world interactions. That's not what this study shows. The positive effects here were small but significant, hinting that social media use might fuel existing friendships and help initiate new ones.

Jonathan Haidt is fond of quoting MIT professor Sherry Turkle's line that we are "forever elsewhere", meaning, as she puts it, that we are constantly turning away from each other toward our phones. I agree that this is a problem, and I suspect that "phubbing" may remain a permanent part of our lexicon. But social interaction is complicated. Haidt and others portray contemporary teens as congregating in silence, each immersed in their phone, and sure, you can see that if you look for it. But you can also see an inspired mix of conversation, phone use, and sharing of screens. You can see a young person in the midst of a videochat turn their phone to the person sitting next to them. Maybe what's "forever" is not that we're elsewhere, but that technology allows us to be elsewhere and here at the same time, if we wish.

All this by way of saying that it's not necessarily surprising that social media use fosters offline friendships and fails to undermine social skills. The boundaries between on- and offline interactions are growing fuzzier.

Improving social media experiences

The two new studies I discussed highlight the complexity of social media experiences. Both are consistent with the notion that more can done to improve these experiences, and many proposals are on the table. (Although the focus is on young people, much of what's being aired would make sense for people of any age.)

Some of the proposals, whether you agree with them or not, aren't very actionable. For instance, the American Psychological Association (APA) offers a list of 10 recommendations, but what exactly should we do with #5 (exposure to cyber-hate should be minimized) or #8 (adolescents should avoid using social media to make beauty-related comparisons)? I agree with both recommendations, but who's responsible for implementing them, and what exactly should they do?

Some of the proposals simply ban exposure. For instance, in The Anxious Generation, Haidt offers four recommendations, three of which consist of bans: No smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16, no phones in schools, and more unsupervised play and independence.

Arbitrary limits like these suffer from excessive convenience. Life would indeed be simpler if nobody could use Instagram until age 16, but there's zero evidence that this is exactly the right age. The APA illustrates a more sensible approach, in the sense of recommending monitoring rather than bans, and using hedges to acknowledge that kids develop at different rates: "In early adolescence (i.e., typically 10–14 years), adult monitoring ...is advised for most youths’ social media use."

As experts often point out, social media affects everyone, regardless of whether or not they use it. A 14-year-old who lacks a smartphone, or whose phone has no social media access, will be absorbing some of its influences second-hand from kids who do have access (if not peering over their shoulders). Meanwhile, they may also be feeling excluded or jealous. Banning anything that one kid sees other kids doing is bound to create complications. This is not to say that certain kinds of restrictions are undesirable – a study published this February shows that banning smart phones in middle school can benefit girls' academic performance and mental health. The point is simply that bans are always going to be complicated.

An alternative (or accompaniment) to banning social media is to maintain open communication with your kids, creating at least some non-judgmental conversational spaces, and, when they're young, guiding their initial forays into social media. You can't shield them from the internet, but you can help them navigate what they encounter, protect themselves, and understand what to do with disturbing content as well attention-sucking features like the infinite scroll.

One other concern about social media bans is that, intentionally or not, they may create the impression that social media is a sort of thorn that, once removed, allows young people to regain their mental health. In her newsletter Techno Sapiens, Dr. Jacqueline Nesi (a co-author on the Norwegian study) observes that social media may have contributed to the youth mental health crisis, but

"my worry in embracing social media as the (single, definitive) cause of the mental health crisis is that we’ll forget about the many other factors that are so crucial to supporting teens’ mental health." 

This is a vital concern. Helping improve young peoples' social media experiences should be folded into a broader effort to do whatever we can to support their mental health.

The Surgeon General's recommendations

A useful starting point for improving social media experiences might be the Surgeon General's 2023 advisory Social Media and Youth Mental Health. I disagree with some of the specific recommendations, but I see this report as an excellent springboard for discussion because the Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, is fairly concrete and clear about who should be doing what to promote better experiences.

In this advisory, Dr. Murthy describes the potential risks and benefits of social media use while acknowledging gaps in the literature. It's an expression of concern rather than a condemnation of the technology, and his recommendations assign responsibility for change to four key stakeholders. Here I'll just touch on a few of the highlights:

1. Policymakers.

Dr. Murthy recommends legislation that ensures greater safety and privacy for social media users, including strengthening and enforcing age restrictions (which is not necessarily ideal for marginalized individuals) as well as greater transparency about algorithms and data use.

One of Murthy's recommendations that's echoed by NORC, APA, and, unsurprisingly, many researchers is support for more research on the topic. I strongly agree. As of last week, Jonathan Haidt is on a book tour promoting his demonization of social media use among young people, but the data, although clearly pointing to mixed effects, seems best described as inconsistent.

One recommendation that I particularly favor here is support for more digital and media literacy curricula in schools. Although in the end you can't shield kids from objectionable design features and content, you can help them understand what they're seeing, how they're being manipulated as consumers, how misinformation is spread, and when they're being mistreated.

2. Technology companies.

Dr. Murthy recommends that tech companies design social media products that prioritize the health and safety of users. The companies should assess the impact of their products and be required to comply with safety standards, analogous to what the manufacturers of toys and seat belts must do. (Here Murthy refers to social media "products" rather than "platforms", a helpful shift in terminology.)

Although tech companies are not likely to make necessary changes without incentives (see, for instance, the EU's new investigation of Meta), a combination of legislative efforts and consumer choice could push the development of platforms with safer content, fewer predators, increased privacy, more efficient responses to user concerns, and design features that are less addictive. Maven, for instance, a new social media platform that promises to be "your social media detox", does away with likes and followers, instead connecting users to topics they've expressed interest in via an algorithm that places more emphasis on chance. This seems like a step in the right direction.

3. Parents and guardians.

Dr. Murthy recommends that parents pursue a mix of instruction (teaching children about social media technology and how to protect themselves) and behavioral guidelines (technology-free zones and other boundaries at home). I particularly like his reminder to model responsible social media behavior (i.e., to be a good "scroll model"). Observational learning has a huge influence on development. If you're on your phone every moment, your kid may end up doing the same - or chafe under rules that you're not following yourself. "Do as I say, not as I do" tends to fail as a parenting strategy.

An important task for parents and guardians is to recognize when social media use is potentially unhealthy or has already begun to cause harm. Murthy wisely avoids specifics ("limit use to 2 hours per day"), but this may not satisfy busy parents who just want to know where to draw the line. My suggestion would be to pay attention to your kids and never assume that any behavioral or emotional changes have simple causes. They might, they might not. If your child seems to devote excessive time to social media, for instance, there may be some underlying problem or problems. Simply restricting access might only make the problem(s) worse.

4. Children and adolescents.

Here Dr. Murthy focuses on creating healthy boundaries, protecting oneself, and seeking help when needed. Although most of what he discusses falls under the heading of what parents and educators should be teaching children, I like the treatment of this as a separate category, because it's consistent with the NORC finding that most young people are already taking steps to manage their own social media use.

Final thought: Phones and platforms

Just as the telephone was once considered a threat to civilization, so there are influential voices claiming now that social media is similarly dangerous, particularly if we allow young people unrestricted use.

I don't believe that demonizing the technology is good for anyone. Social media platforms are rapidly evolving, just as the telephone did in the 20th century, but the data suggests that even in its current X-asperating, Discordant, Meta-tastisized form, social media can be beneficial too.

Perhaps someday social media will be considered as useful and minimally dangerous as phones are now, but we're not there yet. In the meantime, the most realistic, helpful thing we can do is to continue supporting more positive user experiences.

Thanks for reading!