This policy brief is part of CIGI’s project on freedom of thought: Legitimate Influence or Unlawful Manipulation? Find out more at: www.cigionline.org/fot
Policy Brief No. 9 — February 2024
Freedom of Thought, Social Media and the Teen Brain Samantha Bradshaw and Tracy Vaillancourt
Key Points → Social media offers spaces where young people can socialize, learn and play, but these digitally mediated environments also challenge the right to freedom of thought, as surveillance capitalism and attention economics push content harmful to young people’s mental health. → Brain development during adolescence leaves young people particularly susceptible to social pressure, peer opinion and social comparison. Frequent and excessive social media use has been associated with changes in brain physiology. → Policy solutions to protect freedom of thought should not focus on outright technological bans but on measures to restrict exploitive platform design features and on investment in media literacy education to empower teens, parents and teachers to use social media in ways that foster health and well-being.
Introduction Currently, there are more than five billion active social media users worldwide (Petrosyan 2024) who are spending an average of 144 minutes per day using platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube (Dixon 2024). Social media is popular, particularly with adolescents, who use it to chat, send images, share stories and keep up with friends, family and acquaintances (Anderson, Faverio and Gottfried 2023; Vogels and Gelles-Watnick 2023). For many young people, social media is the preferred way of communicating with one another, replacing face-to-face interactions (Rideout and Robb 2018). Given social media’s status with teens, researchers are paying increased attention to understanding how social media use affects adolescent development, in particular, their mental health and well-being (for example, Twenge et al. 2018). Recently, there has been a wave of high-profile media investigations into the relation between social media platforms and mental health, which have documented some potential harms for young people. Headlines such as “The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls” in The Atlantic (Haidt 2021), “American Teens are Really Miserable. Why?” in The New York Times (Douthat 2023) and “Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show” in The Wall Street Journal (Wells, Horwitz and Seetharaman 2021) have raised alarm bells over social media’s impact on teen depression, anxiety and eating disorders. These concerns have grown significantly alongside increasing screen time during