“Furthermore, we show that the harms and risks to individual users are so diverse and vast in scope that they justify the view that social media is causing harm at a population level,” they added. “The academic debate over whether social media is harming adolescents has been complicated by the occasional confusion of two different questions: the product safety question and the historical trends question,” read the report. “Countries around the world ran a giant uncontrolled experiment on their own children in the 2010s by giving them smartphones and social media accounts. Direct, indirect harmsA key evidence presented in the report involved information showing that social media executives and some employees were allegedly aware that “they are causing widespread harm to adolescents on their platforms.”“Quotations and statistics revealed through whistleblowers, lawsuits and leaked documents and studies from inside the major social media companies make this clear,” the report read. “If carried out at scale, we predict that the widespread reduction of social media use by adolescents would cause substantial improvements in population-level measures of well-being and mental health,” the researchers said.

Source: Philippine Star March 22, 2026 16:05 UTC