Stephen Neely

We see that social media, even when we break the data down to just look at Gen Z and millennials, social media is correlated with higher rates of anxiety and depression.

So it's really easy to kind of demonize social media in this conversation because there's clearly very strong links.

I mean, obviously, some of the companies, Meta, Facebook, Instagram, they've been outed even by their own employees who have leaked internal studies showing that they recognize the harm that these platforms are causing, particularly to young women.

So it's really easy to demonize them.

But let's remember that every single technology, every major advance comes with its pros and cons.

A lot of benefits, whether it's helping grandparents stay more connected with their distant grandkids, whether it's facilitating civic engagement to, you know, very pronounced examples like the Arab Spring or like disaster responses where people have been rescued because Twitter worked when the phones didn't.

So we don't want to just throw out the baby with the bathwater here.

What we're looking at is very specific patterns of social media usage.

And where we see the most significant impacts are when we get into, in academics, we use this term called uses and gratifications of media.

Hopefully that doesn't put anyone to sleep.

But uses and gratifications are why we use the media we use and what benefit we receive from them.

When we look at people who just use social media to stay connected with friends and family, they actually have lower on average rates of anxiety than those who use social media for other reasons.

Where are the highest rates of anxiety in social media usage?

It's people who say they use it to stay on top of trends and culture.

to follow news and current events, to learn about health and fitness and beauty trends.

So what we see here is two through lines.

One is social comparison.

People who use social media in ways that facilitate social comparison exhibit higher rates of anxiety.

And then the other is kind of the outrage machine.

And this is where, if you've watched The Social Dilemma or other documentaries about how social media works, you know that the algorithms that determine what you see when you log into Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, whatever it might be, the algorithms that determine what you see are designed to maximize your engagement.