APA – The Science of How Social Media Affects Youth

The Science Behind Social Media Content, Features, and Functions

1. Hypersensitivity to Social Feedback

Brain development starting at ages 10-13 (e.g. the outset of puberty) to the mid-twenties is linked with hypersensitivity to social feedback/stimuli. Thus, youth become inclined to focus on behaviours that elicit personalised feedback, praise, or attention from peers.

• AI-Recommended Content: This type of content can be particularly convincing and hard to refuse for this age group, emphasising the need for prioritising youth safety and welfare over engagement. This could involve restricting personalised recommendations that use youth data, designing features that favour content evoking strong emotions, or depicting illegal or harmful behaviour.

• Likes and Follower Counts: These metrics engage neural regions that trigger repetitive behaviour, exerting a larger significant impact on youths’ attitudes and behaviour than adults. Youth are more susceptible to both positive and negative social feedback from others and leveraging these metrics to retain platform engagement plunders their weaknesses, potentially leading to problematic use.

• Use of Youth Data for Tailored Ad Content: Likewise, tailored ad content is influential on youth who are more prone towards peer influence at this stage and drawn to personalised content.

2. Need for Relationship Skill Building

Adolescence (ages 10–14 years) is a crucial phase for acquiring complex relationship skills, including the ability to forge emotionally intimate connections. Adolescents should be provided with opportunities to practise these skills through one-on-one or small group interactions.

• The focus on metrics like followers counts, likes, and views often directs adolescents’ focus to unilateral, depersonalised interactions which can impede the development of additional healthy and psychologically beneficial relationship skills.

3. Susceptibility to Harmful Content

During adolescence, individuals are particularly vulnerable to peer influence, impressionability, and sensitivity to social rejection. Exposure to harmful content, such as cyberhate, depiction of illegal behaviour, and encouragement of self-harm (e.g. cutting or eating-disordered behaviour), has been connected to an upsurge in mental health concerns among both the targets and their witnesses.

• The lack of clear and transparent processes for tackling harmful content reports makes it difficult for youth to feel safe or seek help when confronted with such content.

4. Underdeveloped Impulse Control

Youths’ developing cortical system (especially in the brain’s inhibitory control network) makes it tougher for them to overcome impulses or avoid short-term gratification, despite unwanted long-term consequences. This culminates in adolescents making decisions based on immediate gains, neglecting long-term threats, and difficulty in focusing on tasks that require concentration.

• Infinite Scroll: As youths have diminished ability to control and stop engagement on social media than adults, they are more prone to infinite scroll features. This results in difficulty disengaging and potentially high rates of clinical dependency on social media.

• Lack of Time Limits: The absence of time constraints on social media use presents challenges for youth, especially during school hours or homework time.

• Push Notifications: Push notifications make use of youths’ sensitivity to distraction. Task-shifting is a complex cognitive ability not fully developed until early adulthood, which may interfere with youths’ focus during classes and when completing homework.

• Data Use and Consent: The use and retention of youths’ data without appropriate parental consent or child assent in developmentally appropriate language exploit their limited understanding of long-term consequences for their actions, the permanence of online content, or their ability to assess risks of their social media engagement.

5. Reliance on Sleep for Healthy Brain Development

Apart from the first year of life, puberty is the most pivotal period for brain growth and reorganisation. Adolescents’ mental health and brain development rely heavily on having adequate sleep. Sleep delays or disturbance can lead to substantial undesirable impact on youths’ attention, behaviour, mood, safety, and academic performance.

• The lack of restrictions on when youth can access social media is a leading factor contributing to adolescents getting less than the recommended amount of sleep, with serious implications for their brain and mental health.

6. Vulnerability to Malicious Actors

Youth are highly susceptible to deception by predators and other malicious actors who may attempt to interact with them via social media channels.

• Connecting and direct messaging with adult strangers exposes youth to identity theft and potentially dangerous interactions, including sexploitation.

7. Need for Parental/Caregiver Partnership

According to research, parental guidance supports youth in making safe decisions and responding appropriately to complex social interactions. While granting parents control over their children’s accounts should balance adolescents’ needs for autonomy, privacy, and independence, it should also make it feasible for parents to collaborate with their children online in a way that fits their family’s needs.

• The scarcity of transparent and user-friendly parental/caregiver tools makes it challenging for parents and guardians to advocate for their children’s social media experience.

A Path Forward Based on Science

Change is urgently needed. Solutions should reflect a deeper understanding of the science in at least three key areas.

Policies will not protect youth unless technology companies are obliged to reduce the inherent risks within their platforms.

As policymakers evaluate their approach to this complicated issue, it is imperative to identify the limitations of commonly proposed policies, which are often misreported and fall short of comprehensive safety solutions required to achieve meaningful change.