On Tuesday, May 23, Dr. Drew Cingel, Associate Professor of Communication at UC Davis, presented his talk, “Adding Nuance in the Debate on Adolescent Social Media Use and Mental Health” at the Cyber Policy Center. An expert on the developmental aspects of children’s and adolescents’ media use, Dr. Cingel outlined studies from the Human Development and Media Lab that provide insight into the specific factors predicting high susceptibility of social media harm. 

To date, the scientific literature has been characterized by mixed findings, while the general public endorses alarmist claims of the addictive nature of social media. But in his work, Dr. Cingel strikes a more nuanced middle ground. He aims to address these broad questions: Which adolescents are more (or less) susceptible to the harms of social media, and why? Identifying such at-risk individuals can then inform policy and interventions to mitigate these harms. 

To develop such recommendations for action, Dr. Cingel argues researchers ought to measure contextual and individual factors that may relate to adolescents’ differential susceptibility to the mental health harms associated with social media, such as depression and anxiety. Contextual factors include culture and use patterns, while individual factors include demographics and individual psychology (e.g., developmental stage, baseline mental health status). 

Compounding the issue is the role of each social media company’s proprietary algorithms that recommend different content to different users. In one study, Dr. Cingel’s team created fake accounts on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram and experimentally manipulated them by acting like different types of users: an 8-year-old vs. a 16-year-old, female vs. male, struggling with mental health or not—based on input from a sample of 50 adolescent social media users. After using these “sockpuppet accounts,” the research team categorized the content of the accounts’ feed recommendations for whether or not the content was child-appropriate, problematic, and distressing. Through this exploratory investigation, the team discovered disturbing rates of bleak, inappropriate content, with implications for real users. 

Ultimately, Dr. Cingel seeks to develop person-specific risk predictions based on an individual adolescent’s contextual and individual factors. Is the same individual susceptible to multiple negative effects? Or is one adolescent susceptible to one outcome, another is susceptible to another? When even 8% of the roughly 42 million US adolescent social media users experience social-media related harms, that’s millions of adolescents who can be helped by research-backed solutions. 

Join us next Tuesday, May 27 at 1pm PDT for the final seminar of the Spring Series. We will be joined by Joanna Smolinska, Counsellor for Digital and Deputy Head of the EU Office in San Francisco, who will present her talk Europe's AI Future: The EU's Plan to Produce AI Technology People Can Trust.