Social media use harming children, adolescents – report

MANILA, Philippines — Governments must consider policies to scale back use of social media among children, according to a new report that detailed harms “at a scale large enough to cause changes at the population level.”

A special chapter in the 2026 World Happiness Report released last week looked into evidence to answer the question, “Is social media use reasonably safe for children and adolescents?”

The answer – according to authors Jonathan Haidt and Zachary Rausch of the Stern School of Business of New York University – is no.

“We show there is now overwhelming evidence of severe and widespread direct harms (such as sextortion and cyberbullying), and compelling evidence of troubling indirect harms (such as depression and anxiety),” they wrote in the report.

“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 findings were based on various evidence laid down in the report, including surveys of young people, parents, teachers and clinicians; content from corporate documents and findings from cross-sectional and longitudinal studies and social media reduction and natural experiments.

“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.

On the historical trends question, which focuses on the impact of rapid adoption of social media in the early 2010s, the researchers said it was “a substantial contributor to the sharp increases in mental illness observed in many Western nations, and beyond.”

The evidence, the researchers said, is sufficient to justify the action of the Australian government last year when it raised the age requirement for opening or maintaining a social media account to 16.

“Just as the recent international trend of removing smartphones from schools is beginning to produce educational benefits, the research we have reviewed suggests that removing social media from early adolescence is likely to produce mental health benefits,” wrote Haidt and Rausch.

“Countries around the world ran a giant uncontrolled experiment on their own children in the 2010s by giving them smartphones and social media accounts. The available evidence suggests that the experiment has harmed them. It is time to call it off,” they added.

Direct, indirect harms

A 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.

It outlined direct and indirect harms to users, including addiction and problematic use, sleep deprivation, sextortion, sexual harassment and issues related to mental health and well-being.

“Once nearly everyone was on these platforms, everyone was stuck in a collective action trap… any individual who quit might find herself even worse off because she would lose her online connections,” it added, referring to the large group-level effects of social media use.

“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.