Social media can have advantages—you are reading this thanks to social media—but also disadvantages. Research is often nuanced on this, but the American Association of Psychologists (APA) just published a new report that dives a little deeper. It looks at which content and elements within social media can have negative effects.

For example, because children and young people often have difficulty with impulse control, these characteristics often cause problems:

• Infinite scroll is particularly risky for youth since their ability to monitor and stop engagement on social media is more limited than among adults. This contributes to youths’ difficulty disengaging from social media and may contribute to high rates of youth reporting symptoms of clinical dependency on social media.
• The lack of time limits on social media use is similarly challenging for youth, particularly during the school day or at times when they should be doing homework.
• Push notifications to capitalize on youths’ sensitivity to distraction. Task-shifting is a higher order cognitive ability not fully developed until early adulthood andmay interfere with youths’ focus during class time and when they should be doing homework.

Being hypersensitive to social feedback also has an influence, for example by:

• AI-recommended content has the potential to be especially influential and hard to resist within this age range.v It is critical that AI-recommended content be designed to prioritize youth safety and welfare over engagement. This suggests potentially restricting the use of personalized recommendations using youth data, design features that may prioritize content evoking extreme emotions, or content that may depict illegal or harmful behavior.
• Likes and follower counts activate neural regions that trigger repetitive behavior, and thus may exert greater influence on youths’ attitudes and behavior than among adults.vi Youth are especially sensitive to both positive social feedback and rejection from others. Using these metrics to maintain platform engagement capitalizes on youths’ vulnerabilities and likely leads
  to problematic use.
• The use of youth data for tailored ad content is similarly influential for youth who are biologically predisposed toward peer influence at this stage and sensitive to personalized content.

The authors of the report also mention, among other things, sleep deprivation, meeting people with bad intentions,…

To be honest, you will learn relatively little new from the report if you follow the science in this field a bit. But at the same time, it is an important statement in a debate that has been going on for some time in the US and which could put further pressure on the position of Meta and Co.