Peer-Reviewed Study

Specification Curve Analysis Shows That Social Media Use Is Linked to Poor Mental Health, Especially Among Girls

Apr 2022 🇺🇸 🇬🇧 Acta Psychologica PEER-REVIEWED

Suicide and self-harm are complex and never caused by one factor alone. Problematic screen use, cyberbullying, harmful content, and online exploitation may increase risk or intensify existing distress. If someone is in immediate danger or emotional crisis in the United States, call or text 988.

Outside the U.S.? Find your local helpline at findahelpline.com.

Published in Acta Psychologica, this paper by Jean Twenge, Jonathan Haidt, Jimmy Lozano, and Kevin Cummins re-examines an influential 2019 paper that applied 'specification curve analysis' to three large adolescent-survey datasets and concluded the link between technology use and mental health, while real, was too small to matter practically. The authors reran the same analysis on the same datasets with different modeling choices — treating social media separately from all 'screen time,' analyzing girls and boys separately, and weighting survey subscales more evenly. Using the original approach, they reproduced the original small-association result. Using the revised approach, they found a substantially larger association between social-media use and poor mental health among girls specifically — larger, they report, than the datasets' own associations with binge drinking, sexual assault, obesity, or hard-drug use. TechKids Foundation cites this as a rebuttal to 'effect sizes are tiny' framings, at least for girls.

Girls' association 5–20x larger under revised modeling choices

The original analysis reported median standardized betas of -0.01 to -0.04; re-run with different modeling choices (activities examined separately, genders analyzed separately), the association for girls' social-media use and mental health rose to median betas of -0.11 to -0.24, per the paper's abstract.

Reproduced original result under original constraints

The authors state they were able to reproduce the original 2019 paper's small-association findings when using its original modeling constraints, before showing how the results changed under alternative, in their view more appropriate, constraints.

VIEW SOURCE →
CITATION

Twenge, Jean M., Jonathan Haidt, Jimmy Lozano, and Kevin M. Cummins. "Specification Curve Analysis Shows That Social Media Use Is Linked to Poor Mental Health, Especially Among Girls." Acta Psychologica 224 (2022): 103512. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2022.103512

REPORT A PROBLEM WITH THIS ENTRY

RELATED EVIDENCE

Talk

Reporter Details Dark Inner Workings of Facebook — Jeff Horwitz at Harvard Kennedy School

In November 2021, weeks after the Facebook Files series ran, Jeff Horwitz discussed the 14-part investigation at a Harvard Kennedy School event moderated by professor Latanya Sweeney, covered by The Harvard Gazette. Horwitz recounted internal research in which the company's own staff associated Instagram use with worsened mental health for a share of teen girls; Facebook publicly stressed that the research was noncausal, a caveat Horwitz accepted while arguing it still represented 'the company's best understanding of reality.' He also described mitigation tools — such as limiting reshares and slowing the spread of the fastest-moving posts — that he said had already been built internally but were left undeployed. TechKids Foundation cites this as the lead reporter's own extended public account of the investigation, delivered at an academic forum, not as an independent study.

Nov 2021 🇺🇸 Harvard Kennedy School / The Harvard Gazette
Talk

What Leaked Internal Documents Reveal About the Damage Facebook Has Caused (Fresh Air Interview)

In this September 23, 2021 Fresh Air interview, Terry Gross talks with Jeff Horwitz days after his Facebook Files series ran, in his own words rather than through the articles. Horwitz describes internal research in which the company's own staff associated Instagram with worsened body image for a share of teen girls — including a presentation to executives stating the platform made body-image issues worse for one in three teen girls reporting the issue — and internal findings in which some teen users who reported thoughts of self-harm traced those feelings to their Instagram experience. These are company-attributed associations from leaked research, not independent clinical findings. Horwitz also describes Facebook's public response, which characterized the research as small-effect and inconclusive. TechKids Foundation cites this as the lead reporter's own long-form account of what the leaked documents did and did not show.

Sep 2021 🇺🇸 NPR (Fresh Air)
News Investigation

Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match

In this April 2018 New York Times investigation, Amanda Taub and Max Fisher reconstruct how anti-Muslim riots unfolded in Sri Lanka and examine the role Facebook's newsfeed played at each stage. Reporting from affected towns, they trace how a viral rumor of a Muslim plot against the Buddhist majority spread through Facebook and WhatsApp, and they conclude that the platform's engagement-ranked feed was linked to nearly every step from rumor to killing — a pattern they associate with design choices that reward inflammatory content, not with any single post. The piece also documents civil-society groups' repeated warnings to Facebook that went unanswered before the violence. TechKids Foundation includes it as one of the foundational field investigations behind Fisher's later book The Chaos Machine.

Apr 2018 🇱🇰 The New York Times (syndicated via New York Times News Service / WRAL)
News Investigation

Facebook Fueled Anti-Refugee Attacks in Germany, New Research Suggests

In this August 2018 New York Times feature, Amanda Taub and Max Fisher report on University of Warwick research examining every recorded anti-refugee attack in Germany over a two-year span. The researchers found that towns where per-person Facebook use ran unusually high also saw markedly more attacks on refugees — a correlation that held across community types, including otherwise tolerant towns like Altena, and that weakened during local internet outages. Taub and Fisher pair the data with on-the-ground reporting on how the platform's ranking of emotionally charged posts may distort a community's sense of local opinion. The study was not peer reviewed at publication, and the article presents the pattern as an association between heavy platform use and offline violence, not a proven single cause. TechKids Foundation includes it as a key data-driven entry in Fisher's platform-harms series.

Aug 2018 🇩🇪 The New York Times (syndicated via New York Times News Service / WRAL)
Talk

The Inside Story of How Silicon Valley Rewired Our Brains — Offline with Jon Favreau

Two days before The Chaos Machine published, Max Fisher joined Jon Favreau's Offline podcast for a long-form conversation about what his interviews with researchers, psychologists, whistleblowers, and Silicon Valley executives suggested about social media's effects on attention, culture, and politics. Fisher walks through the arc his book traces — from the creation of the Facebook newsfeed to the 2016 U.S. election — and argues that the pattern of harms he documented abroad is linked to the platforms' structural, engagement-maximizing design rather than to isolated bad actors. The discussion focuses on how ranking systems that reward outrage are associated with shifts in what users see, share, and believe. TechKids Foundation includes this episode as Fisher's most extended launch-week interview aimed at a general audience.

Sep 2022 🇺🇸 Crooked Media
Talk

The Chaos Machine: How Social Media Rewired Our Brains and Our World — The Rich Roll Podcast #703

In this two-hour-plus episode of The Rich Roll Podcast, Max Fisher discusses the reporting behind The Chaos Machine: how he came to cover social media as an international-affairs story, the ways he argues algorithmic feeds are associated with shifts in users' moral judgments and tolerance for outrage, and research he cites linking recommendation systems to greater acceptance of misinformation and, in volatile settings, susceptibility to violence. Fisher describes engagement-driven design as functioning like a habit-forming product, and the conversation closes with practical strategies for reducing exposure — from disabling algorithmic feeds to muting engagement metrics. TechKids Foundation includes this episode because it pairs Fisher's investigative findings with the kind of concrete, family-usable mitigation steps the library's solutions tag exists to surface.

Sep 2022 🇺🇸 The Rich Roll Podcast
STAY CURRENT

Get new evidence in your inbox.

A weekly digest of what we added — studies, laws, films, hearings. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

SUBSCRIPTIONS PENDING — BUTTONDOWN ACCOUNT NOT CONNECTED

OR FOLLOW THE RSS FEED →