Frontiers | We don't know how social media bans will affect youth but we're doing it anyway!
The scientific community broadly agrees that social media can both benefit and harm children and adolescents. As stated in the APA's Health Advisory on Social Media Use in Adolescence, using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people. Adolescents' online lives both reflect and shape their offline lives. In most cases, social media effects depend on adolescents' personal and psychological characteristics and social circumstances, intersecting with the specific content, features, or functions offered by many social media platforms. In other words, social media effects likely depend on what teens can do and see online, their pre-existing strengths or vulnerabilities, and the contexts in which they grow up. It is agreed that social media bans on their own do not automatically produce relief. Still, they can be part of the equation, as long as they're healthy bans that invest sufficient resources to support a rigorous evaluation.