OXFORD: The World Happiness Report, published on Thursday (March 19), shows a link between heavy social media use among teenagers and a threat to their well-being.
On average, teenagers in the United States are spending almost five hours each day on social media: two hours on YouTube, 1.5 hours on TikTok, and another hour on Instagram. Even more alarmingly, 25 per cent of 13 and 14-year-old Americans spend seven or more hours a day on social media, longer than they spend on sleep, family time, and in some cases, even school.
One chapter in the World Happiness Report asked if social media is safe for adolescents, looking into whether it is a product that, when used regularly, does not put them at risk of mental health problems, especially depression and anxiety, and does not expose them to serious direct harms.
The harm posed by social media on young people is “enough to cause changes at the population level,” according to the study’s authors, due to the overwhelming evidence of direct harms such as sextortion and cyberbullying, as well as indirect harms including depression and anxiety.
Furthermore, the study asks the question of whether the rapid adoption of always-available social media by adolescents that began in the early 2010s contributed to the large increase in mental illness that arose in many Western nations in that decade, and has come to the conclusion that the answer is yes.
It should set off alarm bells that the score for life satisfaction among people under the age of 25 has dropped significantly in the past 10 years, falling by nearly one point on the scale of one to 10 among young people in English-speaking and Western European countries.
A survey of 15-year-olds showed that those who spent five hours or more on social media apps reported lower life satisfaction. Those who spend less than an hour a day, meanwhile, showed the highest levels of well-being, even more than those who are not on social media at all.
Reuters quoted Jan-Emmanuel de Neve, the Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford, who is one of the editors of the report, as saying, “The message coming through loud and clear is that we should try to put the social back into social media.”
In November 2024, Australia passed a law prohibiting children under 16 from being on social media or opening new accounts. Shortly afterwards, Singapore’s Minister of State for Digital Development and Information, Rahayu Mahzam, said in Parliament that the Government is engaging its counterparts in Australia and social media platforms to protect youths in Singapore from online harms.
She added that the government will continue to study the effectiveness of mandating age limits. /TISG
Read also: Malaysia, like Australia, is banning social media for kids under 16. What about Singapore?
