[0:00]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.
[0:17]The question that everyone wants to 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 a like button for instance. The impact social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Tik Tok 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 team 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 in unexpected and dramatic ways. Two things that happened to occur at the same time are not causaly 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%. 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 or 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. We'll ever know whether social media was net good or that bad. I think it was probably net good to be honest. And I think we have pretty strong evidence that even if it might have been net good for most people on average, it seems to have been net 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. When reached for comment, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, Google, which owns YouTube and Tik Tok, all stressed the importance of teen mental health and highlighted the measures each platform is taking to restrict content and safeguard teen well-being.
[4:16]Hi everyone, George Stephanopolis here. Thanks for checking out the ABC News YouTube channel. If you'd like to get more videos, show highlights and watch live event coverage, click on the right over here to subscribe to our channel and don't forget to download the ABC News app for breaking news alerts. Thanks for watching.
