we're in the middle of a youth Mental Health crisis in America this is the defining Public Health Challenge of our time and I'm very concerned that social media has become an important contributor to the pain and struggles that many of our young people are facing the question that everyone wants to answer is does social media negatively impact mental health we have to remember that social media is not one thing it's depending on who you're talking to what content you're seeing what functions you're interacting with the like button for instance the impact social media platforms like
Facebook Instagram and Tick Tock have on the public notably teens is unquestioned but what's still at play is how much of that impact is negative we saw a big decrease in Teen Mental Health increase in depression which was pretty well time locked to when social media got really big and when it became super engaging that year or two as puberty is just beginning is the second most important time for adolescent brain development reorganization for our entire lives and there's a lot of growth and a lot of changes that are happening at the precise time that
we're actually handing them a device that we know makes their brain react and unexpected and dramatic ways two things that happen to occur at the same time are not causally related to one another so we can see some mechanistic pieces and some signs but we can't make causal statements as scientists in a recent CDC study from 2011 to 2021 when social media use was booming the percentage of teen girls who reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness increased by nearly 60 percent it's hard to do an experiment that fully captures the effect of Facebook and
all of the network effects where you know me being on Facebook affects my friends it's just really hard to study if we don't want to wait until we have the most conclusive proof that demonstrates with causality what the harms will be because the time that it takes for science to do that kind of work will lose an entire generation or two despite that sentiment a study released last month from the University of Oxford found no evidence linking individual Facebook data to a negative well-being that study however was specifically for Facebook not Instagram where the demographic
tends to skew younger unfortunately the state of data sharing in 2023 is worse than it was in 2022 and 2021 companies have largely sort of uh in Mass closed databases that are or and apis that were used by academics to understand what sort of behavior was like on the platforms API or application programming interface allows third parties to communicate with its product in the past year Reddit has started charging for API integration and X formerly known as Twitter has largely shut down its access very few platforms are more open today than they have been in
the past I would pass legislation to make data access a lot easier and more robust so that we can get answers in real time to have the evidence that they need in order to do their work sort of effectively will ever know whether social media was net good or that bad I think it was probably not good to be honest and I think we have pretty strong evidence that even if it might have been that good for most people on average it seems to have been bad for teenagers particularly teenagers say from you know age
10 to 14. this is a time when we're saying as a community we have to pay attention we have to do something different immediately and this is an urgent scenario right now reach for common meta which owns Facebook and Instagram Google which owns YouTube and Tick Tock all stress the importance of Teen Mental Health and highlighted the measures each platform is taking to restrict content and Safeguard teen well-being [Music] hi everyone George Stephanopoulos here thanks for checking out the ABC News YouTube channel if you'd like to get more videos show highlights and watch live event
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