Social Media: The Biggest Threat to Teens' Mental Health?

In 2010, Mashable declared June 30 as Social Media Day, intended to celebrate the impact of social media on communication, connection and culture. Originally launched to recognize the positive impact that platforms like Facebook, Twitter (now X) or Instagram have on human interaction around the world, we’re marking the occasion by acknowledging some of the downsides of social media’s unstoppable rise over the past two decades. Specifically, we’re looking at its impact on children and teens, whose lives have changed fundamentally since social media platforms became ubiquitous.

According to a survey of U.S. teens conducted by the Pew Research Center in the fall of 2024, 48 percent of Americans aged 13 to 17 now say that social media has a mostly negative effect on people of their age, up from just 32 percent two years earlier. Only 11 percent of teenagers in the U.S. now describe the impact of social media as mostly positive, with mental health a key concern for both teens and their parents. 55 percent of surveyed parents said that they’re extremely or very concerned about the mental health of teenagers these days, while 35 percent of teens said the same about their own generation.

When asked to name the single biggest threat to their own/their children’s mental health, teens and parents were both most likely to name social media as the one thing that impacts teens’ mental health most negatively. While 44 percent of parents saw social media as the number one threat to their children’s mental wellbeing, 22 percent of teenagers said the same, with bullying and outside pressure/expectations also high on their minds.

“They live in a fake world of social media that limits them as human beings, distancing them from their family,” one concerned mother said about today’s teenagers, while a teenage boy said that constantly being exposed to other people’s opinions on social media was a big problem for his generation and that overuse of social media appeared to be the main cause of depression among people of his age.