Here’s how our leading health survey exposes the shocking fallacy of popular claims that social media damages teenagers’ mental health

These emotional anti-science claims are causing teens to suffer real damage as violent real-life abusers are ignored and now even rewarded by social media trials.

Basic science from the United States’ leading health agency’s definitive biannual survey of thousands of teenagers shows how the wildly popularized teens-and-social-media panic has gone far off the rails.

While media and political commentaries on recent civil suits against Meta, YouTube, and other media giants rail against “addictive” social-media algorithms, the real – and systematically ignored – “algorithm” promoting both more teenage social media use and more mental health problems is parental abuses and family troubles.

The Centers for Disease Control’s 2023 survey of 20,000 teens is the only one that allows detailed analysis of teens’ mental health, social media use, and family troubles. Teen/social media “studies” using data sets that do not include family issues get fawning publicity but are almost all worthless.

I assigned an abuse/adversity level based on the number and seriousness of violence, emotional abuse, addiction, and severe mental health problems involving parents and household adults that teens suffer in their homes. I calculated the hours teens spend on social media, and CDC numbers show teen’s mental health scores (higher scores mean poorer mental health) for each level of abuse (see note below table). The pattern is devastating.

Table 1. The more teens suffer abuse, the more they use social media

Source: CDC, 2023. Note: I assigned an “abuse/adversity level” of 0 if a teen reported no parental/adult violence, emotional abuse, mental health trouble, or drug/alcohol abuse. Additions of 1 point occurred for each level of violent or emotional abuse (rarely, sometimes, frequently, constant), and for parents/adults’ severe mental health problems and drug-alcohol abuse. Social media use was quantified by assuming hours of teen usage ranged from 0 to 4 hours per day for CDC levels of none to less than once an hour, and 4 to 7 hours per day for CDC levels of once an hour to multiple times an hour. This bracketing results in an average teen daily social media usage, 4.3 hours, matching that of other sources. “Mental health score” results directly from the CDC’s scale ranked from 1 (mental health never poor), 2 (mental health occasionally poor), 3 (mental health sometimes poor), 4 (mental health frequently poor), and 5 (mental health always poor).

Other researchers might score in other ways, but their results will be the same: more abuse/adversity accompanies more teen social media use and also accompanies teens’ poorer mental health.

The 27% of teens who live in families whose parents and adults are not abusive, addicted, or severely mentally troubled use social media moderately, an average of 3.4 hours a day, and also enjoy good mental health (only occasionally poor). More abused teens average well over 5 hours a day on social media.

Each level of abuse/adversity is associated with teens’ escalating hours on social media sites, until leveling off among the 2.5% of teens living in severely troubled families (8 or more abuses/adversities), households so chaotic internet use may be disrupted.

At higher levels of abuse/adversity, teens’ mental health approaches frequently poor. These are the teens the rampant fears over the teenage “mental health crisis” are all about… for which today’s fearers then refuse to examine the driving causes.

You’d think those who panic over teens being online excessively would be screaming about the effects associated with abuse. Has any expert, official, or professional cited the obvious fact that if grownups want teens to use social media less (and, incidentally, enjoy better mental health), stop abusing your kids and address your own troubles? Of course not. That wouldn’t be popular in today’s anti-youth climate.

What authorities and their media sycophants do instead

Now, let’s get to the scam; it’s not sophisticated. Just remove the left-hand column showing levels of parental/adult abuse/adversity. Look at what the problem now appears to be: more social media use, more teen depression!

Table 2. Remove abuse column, and suddenly social media looks like the problem

Seriously – this is how primitive today’s ENTIRE teen/social-media debate boiling into media panics, legislative attacks on hundreds of millions young people, drastic censorship and surveillance schemes, and lawsuits has become.

But could both social media use and parent/family abuses/adversities be causing teens’ mental health problems? To find out, pit the CDC’s 2 social media variables (hours online, cyberbullying) against 4 parent/family abuses/adversities (emotional abuse, violence, severe mental health troubles, drug/alcohol abuse) in a standard analysis of all potential causal factors to assess their relative effects.

Results: Parent/family abuses/adversities explain 77% of the known factors affecting teens’ poor mental health; other factors such as school and personal issues, 20%. Adding social media and cyberbullying explains next to nothing. My results closely parallel those of unfortunately obscure CDC analyses.

That’s why the popular teens/social media furor now raging adamantly omits any discussion of family abuses and crises. While some studies and commentaries driving the unhinged global panic over teens using social media may look sophisticated and carry weighty academics, they uniformly banish from discussion the parental and household abuses/adversities that drive teens’ real mental health problems.

Study after alarmist “study” (including today’s latest junk-crap) flooding the media daily make wild claims that social media drives teens’ poor mental health, suicidality, academics, sleeplessness, friendships, academics, neurobiology, you name it – which investigation reveals “effect sizes” so trivial they effectively mean nothing.

So many media splashes and inflamed commentaries could be laughed off as silly if they weren’t so destructive – even to the point of hampering the fraction of teens and adults who do need help with problematic online habits from getting it.

Social media trials: the next circle of anti-youth hell

The Meta “social media addiction” trials signal a new, alarming degeneration from tacitly ignoring abuses of children and teens toward actively celebrating and rewarding abusive parents and derelict officials who ignore real abuse.

· The Los Angeles verdict awarded a violent, fat-shaming, child-torturing parent $6 million for years of driving one daughter to suicide and a second to mental and physical anguish… but who cares? Just blame social media!

· The New Mexico verdict enriched a grandstanding attorney general who fabricated fake child accounts featuring easily unmasked pictures of live children and refused to pursue real traffickers and predators who responded to them… but who cares? Just blame social media!

Delighted money-grubbing lawyers, far-Right authoritarians like Heritage Foundation, Big Tech, and increasingly repressive governments are flocking to exploit these verdicts as added incentives to grab easy largesse, censorship, surveillance, and monopolistic powers while shrugging off real abuses victimizing young people.

Youthful defiance of crazed, destructive social media bans is becoming the only antidote. Teenagers have a non-negotiable right to protect themselves against grownups’ household abuses that institutions are increasingly ignoring and rewarding, and unrestricted social media access is a key tool in teens’ self-protection.