January 16, 2026

expert comments on evidence on benefits and harms of social media and social media bans on young people

Scientists comment on the evidence around the benefits and harms of social media and social media bans on young people. 

Dr Holly Bear, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, said:

“Proposals to restrict or ban social media use for under-16s reflect widespread public concern about young people’s wellbeing in the digital age. Protecting adolescents online is important, and it is right that policymakers and the wider public are engaging seriously with this issue.

“However, the current evidence on social media use and adolescent mental health remains mixed. Findings from cross-sectional and longitudinal studies generally show small and inconsistent associations, which makes it difficult to draw strong causal conclusions. This means the available evidence does not support simple or universal claims that social media use is inherently harmful.

“A key limitation of much existing research is its reliance on overall screen time. Time spent online alone is not a reliable indicator of risk. What appears to matter more is how young people encounter and engage with online content, and what they are exposed to. Young people may come across potentially harmful or sensitive material in a range of ways, including distressing or sexualised content, self-harm material, online harassment, unrealistic body ideals, and algorithmically curated feeds that can amplify vulnerability. Importantly, much of this exposure occurs passively, through feeds and recommendations rather than being actively sought out, which raises important questions about platform design and accountability.

“Our work and that of others suggests that online harms do not occur in isolation but tend to cluster with wider vulnerabilities, including loneliness, online aggression and mental health difficulties. Online experiences also sit within a broader ecosystem that includes family circumstances, peer relationships and school environments. Risk and resilience emerge from the interaction of these factors, rather than from digital exposure alone. It is also important to recognise that not all intentional engagement with sensitive content is necessarily harmful; for some young people it may reflect attempts to seek understanding, connection or support, highlighting the need for nuanced and proportionate responses.

“We support measures aimed at protecting adolescents online. However, policy responses, including age-based bans, should be proportionate to the available evidence and carefully evaluated. At present, there is limited direct evidence on the benefits or potential unintended consequences of blanket bans. Alongside regulation, there is a strong case for approaches that reduce algorithm-driven exposure to harmful content while also promoting safer, healthier and more empowered engagement with digital technologies, supported by ongoing evaluation as platforms and risks continue to evolve.”

Prof Miranda Pallan, Professor of Child and Adolescent Public Health, University of Birmingham, said:

“Whilst there is some existing (but inconsistent) evidence that interventions to limit social media time have a small beneficial effect on wellbeing in adults and adolescents, (Plackett et al. 2023; Nagata et. al. 2025; Radtke et al. 2021), a complete ban on social media use is a different type of intervention that may have different consequences, and currently we do not have evidence on how this intervention would impact on the health and wellbeing of young people. It will therefore be important to examine evidence coming from the newly implemented legislation to ban under 16s social media use in Australia. We also need to be mindful that there are potential unintended consequences of introducing a social media ban for under 16s, therefore if a ban is introduced in this country, it will be imperative to rigorously evaluate its implementation and impacts, ensuring that potential harms, as well as benefits, are assessed.

“In addition, if a social media ban for under 16s is introduced, careful consideration would need to be given to supporting the transition of young people reaching the age of 16 into a world where social media use is ubiquitous across social and professional spaces.

“Finally, given the ubiquity of social media within our society, in parallel with any age restrictions, it remains important to further understand how different social media content impacts on children and adults, and to put in place measures to manage/reduce harmful content.”

References

Plackett R, Blyth A, Schartau P. The impact of social media use interventions on mental well-being: systematic review. Journal of Medical Internet Research. 2023;25:e44922.

Nagata JM, Hur JO, Talebloo J, Lee S, Choi WW, Kim SJ, Lavender JM, Moreno MA. Problematic social media use interventions for mental health outcomes in adolescents. Current Psychiatry Reports. 2025;27:491-9.

Radtke T, Apel T, Schenkel K, Keller J, von Lindern E. Digital detox: An effective solution in the smartphone era? A systematic literature review. Mobile Media & Communication. 2022;10:190-215.

Prof Chris Ferguson, Professor of Psychology, Stetson University, said:

“The current research does not support the usefulness of banning kids from social media.  Research studies do not suggest there is a correlation between time spent on social media and youth mental health.  Further, reducing social media time does not improve mental health.  This ban is likely to be a waste of time and resources.  Further, it prevents opportunities to teach kids how to use social media responsibly.  Like most moral panics, these kinds of efforts do harm in distracting us from real sources of youth mental health problems, mainly families in distress and failing schools.  We have to remember we’ve been through this all before many times from video games, to rock and roll, books to the radio.  These panics over media and technology never do anything to help kids.”

Dr Margarita Panayiotou, Senior Lecturer, University of Manchester, said:

“Bans risk shifting responsibility away from the companies that profit from these platforms and may increase unregulated engagement, and reduce the support afforded by social media. If we are serious about protecting young people, we need evidence-based solutions that work with them, not policies that risk leaving them behind.”

Prof Amy Orben, Research Professor and Programme Leader at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, said:

“There is broad scientific agreement that we need to do more to keep children safe online and to ensure that the digital platforms they use are designed to support their wellbeing and development. What we currently lack is strong scientific evidence on whether banning social media for certain ages is an effective way of achieving this. To my knowledge, there has been no high-quality scientific study that has removed or substantially reduced social media use among healthy under-18s and systematically examined the consequences.

“Within a year, we should know much more about how effective the Australian social media ban has been and whether it led to any unintended consequences. In addition, by summer next year we expect results from a large Randomised Controlled Trial in Bradford schools testing the impact of a social media curfew and one-hour-per-day limit in teenagers. Decision-makers need to judge whether to announce a UK ban before such key evidence is available, due to fears of harms accumulating in the meantime.”

Prof Victoria Goodyear, Professor of Physical Activity, Health, and Wellbeing, University of Birmingham, said:

“There is uncertainty in the current evidence on the benefits and harms of social media use in adolescents, with limited evidence of causal relationships. While some adolescents may experience harm from social media use, others may be unaffected or incur positive benefits.  

“There is currently no robust peer-reviewed and published evidence on the impact of ‘banning’ social media access for U16s.  

“Blanket restrictions are “stop gap” solutions that do little to support children’s longer term healthy engagement with digital spaces across school, home, and other contexts and their successful transition into adolescence and adulthood in a technology filled world.  

“We currently lack an evidence-based best policy and practice approach to addressing social media use in adolescents. All new approaches and policies need to be accompanied by robust evaluation.”  

Reference:

Goodyear et al. (2025). Approaches to children’s smartphone and social media use must go beyond bans. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2024-082569  

Prof Dennis Ougrin, Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Global Mental Health, Queen Mary University of London, said:

“Secondary analysis of a randomised clinical trial published in the JAMA Network Open (Schmidt- Persson et al., 2024) provides the strongest evidence to date that reducing children’s screen time can lead to meaningful improvements in mental health. In the study, families assigned to a structured screen media reduction intervention significantly decreased children’s recreational screen use and saw measurable reductions in emotional and behavioural difficulties, particularly symptoms of anxiety, low mood, and inattention, alongside improvements in prosocial behaviour. Importantly, the benefits were observed across a broad age range and without evidence of harm, suggesting that practical, family-based approaches to moderating screen use can support children’s emotional well-being. This study wasn’t banning the use of screen time or explicitly looking at social media use. Even so, the findings offer policymakers, clinicians, and parents preliminary but clear, evidence-based reassurance that reducing screen exposure can be a positive and achievable step toward healthier childhood development. What we need are larger studies of a similar randomised trial design to further validate these findings, to understand longer term impacts of reduced screen use, and to assess whether there are specific impacts of reducing (or potentially banning) social media use in young people.”

Reference:

Schmidt- Persson et al. (2024). Screen Media Use and Mental Health of Children and Adolescents -A Secondary Analysis of a Randomized Clinical Trial doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.19881

Prof David Ellis, Chair of Behavioural Science, University of Bath, said:

“Online harms are of course very real – there is naturally risk for everyone when they go online. Misinformation, bullying, unsuitable content has always been a part of the internet. Online benefits are also very real – social media allows people to communicate with each other, share information and lets be honest, it is generally an enjoyable activity (hence why people young and old use these platforms regularly). 

“Perhaps because of that balance and because many other factors are known to have a much larger impact on childhood, current evidence suggests very small effects at a population level when it comes to associations between social media/smartphone use on wellbeing e.g., McCrae et al., 2017; Vahedi & Zannella, 2021; Yoon et al.,2019). Note that not all the above reviews involve children. Also, that these are all reporting associations, not cause and effect. 

“When it comes to the general use of social media and smartphones, the effects on mood or wellbeing are so small ‘that they require implausibly large behavioral changes to produce even minor mood shifts.’ (Winbush et al., 2025; p6)

“Also worth remembering that the small effects identified are heavily reliant on estimates of time spent on platforms, which we know don’t reflect reality (Ellis et al., 2019). More work is ongoing to better understand what children are actually engaging with online day-to-day.

“Therefore, it remains difficult to square what a ban might actually accomplish, and that’s before we get to how difficult those bans are to enforce and how it can lead to new risky online behaviours. We have yet to unpack the impacts of what has taken place in Australia, but all the same issues apply as outlined above. It makes complete sense that parents want governments to act, but the science does not currently support the view that a ban of social media for young people will significantly improve wellbeing.”

References:

Ellis, D. A., Davidson, B. I., Shaw, H., & Geyer, K. (2019). Do smartphone usage scales predict behavior?. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 130, 86-92.

McCrae, N., Gettings, S., & Purssell, E. (2017). Social media and depressive symptoms in childhood and adolescence: A systematic review. Adolescent

Research Review, 2(4), 315–330. 

Vahedi, Z., & Zannella, L. (2021). The association between self-reported depressive symptoms and the use of social networking sites (SNS): A meta-analysis. Current Psychology, 40(5), 2174–2189. 

Winbush, A., McDuff, D., Hernandez, J., Barakat, A., Jiang, A., Heneghan, C., … & Allen, N. B. (2025). Smartphone use in a large US adult population: Temporal associations between objective measures of usage and mental well-being. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(43), e2427311122.

Yoon, S., Kleinman, M., Mertz, J., & Brannick, M. (2019). Is social network site usage related to depression? A meta-analysis of Facebook–depression relations. Journal of Affective Disorders, 248, 65–72.

Declared interests

Dr Holly Bear: I undertake consultancy work via Oxford University Innovation for Girl Effect, a charitable NGO, providing advisory input on youth mental health interventions. This work is not related to social media regulation or policy

Prof Miranda Pallan: I don’t have any competing interests to declare.

Prof Chris Ferguson: I have no funding or ties of any kind from social media or any other technology companies.  I once consulted with the free-speech group Foundation for Individual Rights in Education on a social media legal case in the US. 

Dr Margarita Panayiotou: Our project (#So.Me study: Exploring social media and adolescent mental health) is funded via MRC-UKRI.

Prof Amy Orben: Co-principal investigator of the Wellcome funded social media reduction trial in Bradford; member of the Austraian eSafety Commissioner’s Social Media Minimum Age Evaluation Academic Advisory Group; Director of the DSIT research commission “Feasibility Study of Methods and Data to Understand the Impact of Smartphones and Social Media on Children and Young People”; Member of DfE Science Advisory Council and DSIT/DCMS College of Experts; ESRC Smart Data Research UK Programme Board member, Digital Futures for Children Advisory Board member; In 2023 I gave paid talks to SWGfL and Apple University; I have received funding or consultancy payments from UKRI, Wellcome Trust, Jacobs Foundation, Huo Family Foundation, UK Department of Innovation Science and Technology, Prudence Trust, National Institute of Health, Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge and Barnardo’s.

Prof Victoria Goodyear: VG is funded by the NIHR and Birmingham Alumni for research on smartphones and wellbeing and school smartphone policies, and the ESRC related to behavioural research. VG was a consortium member for a UK Department for Science Innovation and Technology funded project focused on children’s smartphone and social media use. VG was the principal investigator responsible for leading the programme focused on digital literacy education for teachers funded by Google in 2019

Prof Dennis Ougrin: No declarations of interest

Prof David Ellis: I am a member of a government-commissioned research project led by Cambridge – more details here https://www.bath.ac.uk/announcements/university-of-bath-research-to-examine-impact-of-smartphones-and-social-media-on-young-people/