Researchers agree on a solid consensus in the great “meta-analysis” quarrel over whether social media affects teenagers’ mental health

It doesn't.

Once again, a fear-driven panic over youth gains political traction just as the scientific basis for it collapses.

The massive squabble over the “effect size” of social media on teenagers’ mental health, featuring statisticians challenging each other’s analyses of studies that don’t apply to teenagers anyway, all agree on the same “bottom line”:

Social media has just about no effect on teenage or adult mental health.

Social-media blamers Jonathan Haidt, Zach Rausch, and Jean Twenge, sometimes-blamer David Stein, and outside referee Matthew B. Jané have conducted exhaustive reanalyses that all ended up confirming skeptic Christopher Ferguson’s chief point: social media’s association with teenagers’ mental health) is various levels of nothing.

The standard Cohen’s d-statistic (a common measure of “effect size”) shows:

Ferguson et al’s two analyses: d < 0.08. Zero effect.

Rausch/Haidt’s reanalysis: maximum d = 0.17 to 0.20. Trivial.

Twenge/Haidt’s estimate for girls: maximum d = 0.20. Trivial.

Stein’s reanalysis: maximum d = 0.20. Trivial.

Jané’s initial re-analysis: d < 0.09, nothing.

Those nothings result even after maxing out social media as the ONLY factor affecting mental health, an assumption akin to claiming that if you exclude cigarette smoking, listening to country music is the cause of lung cancer.

Independent statisticians led by Jané reviewed the competing analyses and concluded: “The bigger issue, in our opinion, is simply the evidence from these experimental studies is not very good… Which brings us back to the fundamental question. Does reducing social media improve teen mental health? With the current evidence, we don't think there's any way to know.”

The weak design of single-factor before-after studies (subjects can easily surmise the hypothesis, rendering them vulnerable to experimenter biases) cited by social-media blamers makes them all but useless even if they did find something important, which they haven’t.

The fact remains: no one is finding any research basis for the emotional hullaballoo that social media is “rewiring childhood” and smartphones are “destroy(ing) a generation,” let alone restrictive policies and mass bans. The statistics are indistinguishable from random noise.

Compare the nothing-values found for social media effects with the powerful d-values from the 2023 CDC survey for the effects of troubled parenting on teenagers:

Teen’s depression and parent-inflicted emotional abuse: d = 0.88, very strong

Teens’ depression and parents’ depression: d = 0.73, strong

Teens’ depression and parents’ domestic violence: d = 0.66, strong.

This vastly overamped obsession with social media is a grotesque distraction from facing real challenges to mental health. Factually, the crusade against teens using social media has collapsed. Politically and media-wise, unfortunately, it remains all the rage.