Social Media and the Youth Mental Health Crisis: Biased Interpretations and Simple Narrative

Some academics and pundits contend that social media use has caused a youth mental health crisis. These claims often rely on correlational evidence, ignoring the confounding effects of developmental, environmental, social, and psychological factors. The narrative that social media causes poor mental health oversimplifies the complex etiology of mental health problems. We call for a more nuanced understanding of the role of social media in youth mental health. Additionally, we urge researchers to move beyond vague, narrative-driven verbal theories and encode them into precise, testable causal models. Using simulation techniques and specification curve analyses, we show how misspecified models that ignore these confounding factors can lead to biased conclusions about social media’s adverse effects.