The empirical association between adolescent social media use and mental health outcomes is small and methodologically fragile; the evidence does not warrant attributing the post-2012 youth mental health decline principally to smartphones, and the popular synthesis on this question has run ahead of its data.
Specification-curve analyses (Orben & Przybylski 2019 and successors) systematically vary analytic choices across thousands of plausible model specifications and find that the median association between adolescent digital technology use and well-being explains less than half a percent of variance — comparable in magnitude to associations with eating potatoes or wearing glasses.
Candice Odgers is a developmental psychologist at UC Irvine, past president of the Society for Research on Adolescence, and a methodological specialist in adolescent well-being research; her 2024 *Nature* review of the same evidence base concludes that the data do not support a primary causal role for smartphones.
TODO: a single claim summarizing the set of plausible confounders (declining sleep, less unsupervised face-to-face time, changes in clinical screening practice) that the available studies cannot cleanly separate from social-media exposure.
Odgers — The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness? (Nature 2024)
Orben & Przybylski — The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use (Nature Human Behaviour 2019)
Odgers — The great rewiring (Nature 2024)
Orben & Przybylski — Adolescent well-being and digital tech use (Nat Hum Behav 2019)
Showcase: Smartphones, social media, and adolescent mental health