Yesterday, the EU announced a new investigation into child safety laws on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram;

This new study by Matti Vuorre and Andrew K. Przybylski (H/T Wouter Duyck) may be relevant to take into account, too. These are the main conclusions based on data collected between 2006 and 2021 among 2,414,294 individuals:

The main thrust of our analysis was to examine to what extent this positive association between internet adoption and well-being was sensitive to different demographic groups and modeling decisions. Furthermore, we attempted to estimate the unique contributions of internet on well-being by examining this association across 64 different permutations of sets of plausible covariates that might otherwise create or mask associations. Across 33,792 of such model specifications, 84.9% of the associations were significantly positive, and only 0.4% were negative.

We did, however, observe a notable group of negative associations between internet use and community well-being. These negative associations were specific to young (15–24-year-old) women’s reports of community well-being. They occurred across the full spectrum of covariate specifications and were thereby not likely driven by a particular model specification. Although not an identified causal relation, this finding is concordant with previous reports of increased cyberbullying (Przybylski & Bowes, 2017) and more negative associations between social media use and depressive symptoms (Kelly et al., 2018; but see Kreski et al., 2021). Further research should investigate whether low community well-being drives engagement with the internet or vice versa.

Abstract of the study:

Internet technologies’ and platforms’ potential psychological consequences remain debated. While these technologies have spurred new forms of commerce, education, and leisure, many are worried that they might negatively affect individuals by, for example, displacing time spent on other healthy activities. Relevant findings to date have been inconclusive and of limited geographic and demographic scope. We examined whether having (mobile) internet access or actively using the internet predicted eight well-being outcomes from 2006 to 2021 among 2,414,294 individuals across 168 countries. We first queried the extent to which well-being varied as a function of internet connectivity. Then, we examined these associations’ robustness in a multiverse of 33,792 analysis specifications. Of these, 84.9% resulted in positive and statistically significant associations between internet connectivity and well-being. These results indicate that internet access and use predict well-being positively and independently from a set of plausible alternatives.