Screens & Social Media

By Emily Oster. Excerpts:

"The problem is that the vast majority of this evidence does not have any credible claim to causality. It shows correlations that have many interpretations (mental health could drive social media usage, for example). Although there are huge numbers of these studies, they aren’t convincing — individually or together — about anything. 

There is a small amount of evidence that makes stronger claims to causality. One element is time trends: Haidt and his colleagues argue that the decline in mental health for girls lines up with the rollout of social media. Others dispute this, and the evidence on the timing in trends in mental health depends to some extent on which data source one uses."

"I think these papers make a strong case that some kinds of social media usage can negatively affect mental health, although these are specific settings, they are generally not with teens, and Facebook (especially during the rollout in 2007) is quite different from Instagram, TikTok, or even Facebook today. Reasonable people could argue that these conclusions do not generalize."

"Some kids do benefit, and others clearly lose. I think the evidence does suggest that, on average, it is probably a negative. But how large? And does that outweigh some of the positive impacts? This isn’t obvious."

"The harder question here is how to implement this policy (no phones in schools). There are two barriers. First: For very good reason, many teachers do not want their job to be phone police. This means that to implement this, schools will need resources beyond teachers saying, “Put your phones away.” There are good approaches — collecting and locking up phones at the start of the school day — but they often cost money. There is a need for innovation and resources here.

The second barrier is parents. A lot of parents want to call or text their kids at school."