Australia’s social media ban for youth took effect late last year. As of this past December, children and adolescents younger than 16 are prohibited from accessing certain social media sites. (Momentum for similar “online safety” policies is gathering; California governor Gavin Newsom has recently endorsed a similar policy, joining Senator Ted Cruz and Florida governor Ron DeSantis.) The express intent of Australia’s policy is to safeguard youth mental health by keeping young people off of social media sites, shielding them from addictive user interface design and exposure to potentially harmful content, and reducing their “screen time.”

There have been some criticisms directed at Australia’s policy concerned with its implementation (i.e., age verification schemes) and fairly weak enforcement mechanisms (i.e., small fines for tech platforms that do not comply). Rather than the details of implementation or enforcement, I intend to critique the basis of Australia’s policy. What, exactly, is Australia’s social media ban supposed to intervene on, and how does it relate to youth mental health?

Is screen time good or bad for youth mental health? Though our understanding of the relationship between screen time (and digital technologies generally) and mental health continues to evolve, the picture is still a muddy one. It seems fairly obvious that social media, specifically, can be pretty bad for mental health. (As just one example, internal research documents from Meta reveal that as early as 2019 they knew that “we make body-image issues worse for one in three teenage girls.”) We know by now that social media is designed to be addictive: “They understand that if children stay online, they make more money.”

These things are well-established, which makes it all the more curious why the existing research literature on screen time and mental health does not strongly bear them out. The literature is, in a word, confusing—looking at it, you might come away unsure of whether screen time is good, bad, or neutral from the perspective of youth mental health.

Research syntheses from 2022 and 2023 found small and inconsistent associations between screen time and “internalizing and externalizing symptoms” and stress, anxiety, and depression, respectively. Two papers from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) study each reported increases in mental health symptoms per unit of screen time, but the effect sizes are tiny, even in the large ABCD cohort—raising questions about how meaningful the associations are. So what’s going on here? Why does the research literature not seem to support what is increasingly obvious to individuals, parents, and policymakers?

One explanation for what is going on here is that we are actually asking the wrong question. We’re asking whether screen time is good or bad for youth mental health, but in so doing we’re making an assumption that forecloses deeper thinking about what the relationship between screen time and youth mental health really is.

Of course, there are other explanations for the inconclusiveness of the research findings. These explanations, including the difficulty of measuring screen time accurately, the cross-sectional and observational nature of most studies, small sample sizes, the ubiquity of screen exposure among young people (making it harder to detect a clear “signal” or association with mental health outcomes), and heterogeneity of screen time itself (i.e., spending time social media is likely worse for mental health than watching educational videos on YouTube), are probably not wrong per se. However, these explanations—along with the question “is screen time good or bad for youth mental health?”—all rest on an implicit assumption: that just interacting with screens more directly worsens mental health.

Why does this matter? It’s likely that interacting with screens more has at least some impact on mental health for a number of people—so what’s the big deal? If we conceive of screen time as being directly related to mental health problems, then we might be thinking about and designing interventions at the wrong level—focusing on screen time itself rather than the root causes of screen time (or worsening mental health). There is also the risk, if we rely on the inconclusive research literature built on this implicit mechanistic hypothesis, of engendering a “moral calm” (the opposite of a moral panic) about how youth are interacting with technology—not taking appropriate action because there’s not a clear or consistent signal in the research literature.

If there isn’t a direct relationship between screen time and mental health, then what is a better explanation? The very existence of a construct called “screen time” reflects a deeper, underlying social and economic process: Increasing wealth inequality could be the cause of both increases in screen time and worsening youth mental health.

There are two aspects to wealth inequality that are equally important for understanding trends in screen time and youth mental health. First, increasingly extreme concentrations of wealth and poverty in general are likely to have impacts on mental health (for a quick skim of the voluminous literature on this topic see this Lancet study, a Nordic study, and a meta-analysis). Effects of increasing polarization of wealth and poverty on the real economy have great potential to affect mental health, particularly among younger people who are more likely to be more “exposed” to these economic effects. Stagnating or declining wages, increasing prices, decreasing availability and quality of social supports, corrosion of traditional social safety nets, increasing precarity and instability—it’s easy to see how, given the circumstances of a particular person’s life, these currents could engender or exacerbate feelings of anger, hopelessness, worthlessness, or more clinically speaking, of depression, anxiety, stress, and so on.

The second aspect of the process of increasing wealth equality that is important for refining our picture of how screen time relates to youth mental health involves the specific form that this concentration of wealth has taken in our society. In the US, the tech sector is where the most extreme wealth is concentrated. The explosion of consumer technology over the last 20-25 years and the concurrent rise of social media platforms have resulted in an unprecedented concentration of wealth; profits in this sector depend on people using the platforms, leading to recruitment and retention through addictive design features and high burdens to disengaging or quitting (e.g., opaque and difficult processes for deleting an Instagram account).

Many of these trends were exacerbated by the Covid pandemic. Remote/hybrid schooling and work are much more common now than they were pre-2020, just as the effects of increasing wealth inequality in the real economy mean the accelerated loss of “real life” spaces that facilitate connection. The advent of these consumer technologies has dramatically reformatted many aspects of how we socialize and relate to others around digital interaction and consumption. Screen time is just a quantifiable proxy for this much larger process that is changing how people interact, fundamentally upsetting established human modes of connection and communication. As young people especially are being further alienated from face-to-face connection and real-life spaces, many are talking to AI chatbots instead of each other, turning to yet more practically unregulated tech products for a simulacrum of connection, friendship, and emotional support. This is cause for concern.

In her recent book Why Live: How Suicide Becomes and Epidemic, Helen Epstein documents suicide “epidemics” and links them to destabilizing transformations in the ways that people relate to each other, such as how they express or receive love, or how and why they help each other or exchange favors. Many of Epstein’s examples involve societies that underwent dramatic transitions from “traditional” economies to “marketized” economies. Though the process in the US (and in other rich countries) has different features, it is easy to see how a similarly dramatic process is underway here.

If both increases in screen time and worsening youth mental health are downstream consequences of this underlying process of wealth concentration, and of the reorganization of society and sociality to facilitate the accumulation of tech wealth specifically, this could explain the small effect sizes, contradictory findings, and other issues that characterize the literature on screen time and youth mental health. It also provides us with a more productive framework for understanding the total phenomenon. The research findings may be contradictory, but the story is consistent if instead of a direct mechanistic relationship (screens make you depressed—which admittedly may be a contributing factor), the relationship of interest to policymakers and researchers is two effects of the same cause (you’re depressed because the world is getting leaner and lonelier, and the way that’s happening means you’re on your phone a lot of the time).

The question is screen time good for kids? presupposes a world characterized by “screen time.” In fact, the world characterized by screen time is the world of increasing wealth inequality in the real economy and increasing fragmentation, atomization, and enclosure of the most minute social interactions for private profit. Is that good? Is it good for kids’ mental health that we’re living in this kind of world, where screen exposure has become ubiquitous in the span of a decade?

Given how harmful we know social media is for young people’s mental health, banning social media for kids is may be a helpful step, unless the implementation is seriously mismanaged. But it remains to be seen how much of an impact it will have if the fundamental economic structures remain undisturbed. The larger social process—increasing wealth inequality and concentration in an increasingly monopolistic and unaccountable tech sector—demands urgent attention and redress at a structural level.

The post Is Focusing on Screen Time Diverting Us From the Real Drivers of Youth Distress? appeared first on Mad In America.

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