Experience Stern | Faculty & Research

Overview: In the paper titled, “Social Media Is Harming Young People at a Scale Large Enough to Cause Changes at the Population Level,” NYU Stern Professor Jonathan Haidt and Senior Research Scientist Zachary Rausch evaluate the safety of social media for adolescents by addressing two distinct questions: the “product safety question” (is ordinary use safe for the individual) and the “historical trends question” (did the sudden introduction of smartphones and always-available social media in the early 2010s cause the spike in mental illness that began at that time).

Why study this now: The debate over social media often stalls while stakeholders wait for “definitive proof” of causality. However, the authors argue that the current usage rates demand immediate intervention. The average U.S. teen now spends nearly five hours per day on social media, with 25% of 13-to-14-year-olds spending seven or more hours daily. Because puberty is an important time period for brain development, this extremely high exposure makes the safety of these platforms an urgent public health concern.

What the researchers found: The authors conclude that social media is unsafe for adolescents, citing "overwhelming evidence" of harm across two categories:

• Direct harms (quantifiable, widespread safety hazards)
  • Sexual Harassment: Internal research from Meta suggests 13% of Instagram users aged 13–15 (approx. 5.7 million teens) receive unwanted sexual advances every week.
  • Sleep Deprivation: 45% of U.S. teens (approx. 17.5 million) report that social media negatively impacts their sleep.
  • Addiction: Estimates suggest 10% of adolescents suffer from problematic use, amounting to nearly 4 million U.S. teens.
• Indirect harms
  • Social media reduction experiments show that stopping use for just two weeks can reduce the prevalence of clinical depression by roughly one-third.
  • Harms are often found to be more substantial for girls, particularly regarding depression and anxiety.

What does this change: This shifts the burden of proof from parents to policymakers. The authors argue that the "preponderance of evidence" is now strong enough to justify aggressive regulation, such as raising the minimum age for social media accounts to 16 (similar to recent legislation in Australia) and removing phones from schools (similar to recent legislation in New Jersey). It also reframes the issue as a "collective action trap": individual teens cannot easily quit because they fear they would lose their social connection, meaning state-level or population-level interventions are required to free them from the platform's grip without social penalty.

Key insight: "Countries around the world ran a giant uncontrolled experiment on their own children in the 2010s by giving them smartphones and social-media accounts,” said the authors. “The available evidence suggests that the experiment has harmed them. It is time to call it off."

This paper will be published as part of the 2026 World Happiness Report.