EXISTING SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERIMENTS CAN’T ANSWER BIG QUESTIONS
Studies like these address narrow, specific questions. They are simply unable to answer the big question of whether long-term reduction in social media use benefits mental health.
For one thing, they look at specific platforms rather than overall social media use. For another, most experiments don’t really define “social media”. Facebook is obviously social media, but what about messaging services such as WhatsApp, or even Nintendo’s online gaming platform?
In addition, few if any of these studies involve interventions or outcomes that can be measured objectively. They consist of asking people – often undergraduate students – to reduce their social media use, and then asking them how they feel.
This creates a range of obvious biases, not least because people may report feeling differently based on whether they were asked to make changes in their life or not.
In a medical study assessing a drug’s effect on mental health it is common to administer a placebo – a substitute that should not have any biological effect on the participant. Placebos are a powerful way to mitigate bias because they ensure the participant does not know if they actually received the drug or not.
For social media reduction studies, placebos are virtually impossible. You cannot trick a participant into thinking they are reducing social media when they are not.
INDIVIDUAL CHANGES AND A SOCIAL PROBLEM
What’s more, these studies all work at the level of changes to the behaviour of an individual. But social media is fundamentally social. If one college class uses Instagram less, it may have no impact on their mental health even if Instagram is bad, because everyone around them is still using the platform as much as ever.
Finally, none of the studies looked at teenagers. At present, there is simply no reliable evidence that getting teenagers to use social media less has an impact on their mental health.
Which brings us back to the fundamental question: Does reducing social media improve teen mental health?
With the current evidence, we don’t think there’s any way to know.
Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz is an epidemiologist and senior research fellow at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Matthew B Jane is a PhD student in quantitative psychology at the University of Connecticut, United States. This commentary first appeared on The Conversation.
