A team at the University of Iowa found that not all social media behaviors carry the same level of risk. Here’s what they found and what steps parents can take.
IOWA CITY, Iowa — As social media use among teenagers continues to rise, researchers at the University of Iowa say the conversation around teen mental health needs to move beyond simple screen-time totals and focus more closely on how young people are using the platforms.
Jonathan Platt, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Iowa, recently helped review more than 80 studies examining links between social media use and mental health outcomes among adolescents and young adults.
You can check out the team’s full findings here.
The research found that not all social media behaviors carry the same level of risk.
“We found a lot of measures were inconsistent,” Platt said. “A lot of measures had no real relationship with mental health outcomes, but a couple of things emerged.”
How is mental health being impacted?
Among the strongest concerns were behaviors tied to social comparison and what researchers described as social media addiction.
Platt said social comparison often happens when teens scroll through carefully curated portrayals of other people’s lives and compare themselves against unrealistic standards.
“You’re thinking about how this person’s life is portrayed and the ways in which your life is maybe a little bit less adequate than that or less interesting and satisfying,” he said. “Which can affect, of course, self-esteem and the way that young people see themselves.”
Researchers found those patterns were associated with anxiety, depression and other mental health concerns.
The review also identified addictive patterns of social media use as another consistent risk factor.
“You could think about social media addiction as analogous to addiction to anything,” Platt said. “It’s the first thing you do when you wake up. You think about using social media more than you want to or use it more than you want to. You use social media even though it interferes with other things that you know you should be doing.”
At the same time, the study found less consistent evidence connecting other common behaviors to mental health problems, including active posting versus passive scrolling.
“There were a lot of different behaviors that weren’t really associated with mental health problems,” Platt said. “Like the size of your social media network or active content posting versus passive scrolling.”
Some studies even suggested creative uses of social media could provide benefits.
“People who said they use it for creative expression or just creating content had some positive effects there,” he said, including reduced loneliness and stronger feelings of connection.
Platt said one of the biggest drivers behind harmful experiences online may be the platforms themselves.
“These algorithms are not a linear feed of our timelines,” he said. “They are very specifically engineered by very smart people with pretty much the primary goal of maximizing the time that we spend on them.”
He pointed to platform features such as infinite scrolling, autoplay and emotionally charged content designed to keep users engaged.
“If you open a TikTok account today, you have a full feed to start from from the first minute you’re on the platform,” Platt said.
He also cited internal Meta research showing only a small percentage of content users encounter comes from people they actually know.
“About 7% of the content that people encounter on their platforms is from people that they know,” he said. “The rest of it is from things that are pushed to them from external sources, from the news, highly sensationalized things, highly emotionally arousing things.”
According to Platt, that shift has fundamentally changed the social media experience from one centered on relationships to one increasingly driven by algorithmic engagement.
“I think all of those features really are at odds with what we originally signed up on these platforms for,” he said. “Which is to interact with our friends, with our family, maybe meet new people or find new communities.”
What does this mean for offline behavior?
The research also examined how social media habits may affect young people offline.
Platt said many teens and adults alike have become uncomfortable with boredom, silence and unstructured moments because of the constant stimulation social media provides.
“You get really easily habituated to those dopamine hits that social media gives you,” he said. “People are waiting in line for something and almost every single person is just scrolling their phone because there’s no comfort with the idleness.”
He said researchers are still working to better understand how constant stimulation may affect brain development, reward processing and conditions such as anxiety, depression and ADHD.
The issue is especially important during adolescence, Platt said, because teenagers are still developing social skills, independence and personal identity.
“This is a really important time for the development of social skills and social networks and independence,” he said. “The social media platforms and the way that they are set up has the potential to really disrupt those processes.”
Despite social media’s widespread role in daily life, Platt said studying its effects remains difficult because researchers often cannot access detailed platform data.
“It can be really hard from a research perspective to get access to those data, and it’s increasingly harder,” he said.
Still, Platt said recent legal and policy developments could push platforms toward changes.
Countries including Australia and Indonesia have established minimum age requirements for social media accounts, while lawsuits against major technology companies have increasingly focused on whether platform design itself contributes to harm.
“I think there’s a lot of hope for our ability not to ban these platforms entirely but to say we can assert some control over these,” Platt said.
What steps can parents take?
Closer to home, he said families can also take practical steps to encourage healthier social media habits, especially heading into summer when students often have more unsupervised free time.
Among his recommendations: keep phones out of bedrooms, set clear household boundaries around screen use and normalize regular conversations about social media rather than discussing it only during conflicts.
“It’s important for parents to be able to normalize talking about social media with their children,” Platt said. “Not, ‘I only want to talk about this when I’m scolding you about it.’”
He also encouraged parents to model healthy behavior themselves.
“Adults and parents modeling healthy social media use behavior too,” he said. “Setting boundaries around not having your phones in sight at the dinner table or after certain hours.”
Platt said communities can also work together to create shared expectations among families so children do not feel isolated if restrictions differ from household to household.
“We all are going to adhere to these policies and practices together,” he said. “So no kid feels like they’re left out.”
While researchers continue studying the long-term effects of social media, Platt said enough evidence already exists to justify conversations about healthier online environments for young people.
“We care about our young people, and everyone should,” he said. “It’s a bipartisan issue.”
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