Social Media

Research Studies

MIT Professor Alexey Makarin on why social media harms youth mental health

Social media has a negative effect on youth mental health. We study the staggered introduction of Facebook across U.S. colleges and use a difference-in-differences estimation strategy to isolate the causal impact of Facebook vis-a-vis any differences across colleges or nationwide changes. We find a negative causal impact of Facebook’s rollout on the mental health of college students. In particular, the most affected conditions were depression and anxiety disorders. We find that among people who, based on their observable characteristics, were most predisposed to mental health problems, the effect was bigger, and those people were more likely to take up mental health services, such as anti-depression therapy. We also find that students reported experiencing issues with academic performance due to their worsening mental health.