For the most vulnerable children and teenagers, social media is incredibly dangerous | thearticle

There is something almost endearingly passé about the phrase ‘screen time’. The idea that time can be meaningfully divided into life lived in ‘the real world’ and hours spent looking at a

screen may make sense to my generation – the kids who squeezed in an hour of The Sims after school before being turfed off the family computer because someone needed to use the landline –

but to anyone under the age of 23, it’s cringe. Ever since smartphones and the dawn of social media (when internet users shifted from being ‘content consumers’ to ‘content creators’), the

line between the ‘real world’ and the ‘online world’ has been blurred. In 2019, chats with friends started in the school playground are picked up without a missed beat on Whatsapp at the end

of the day, and crushes become relationships when one party ‘slides into [the other’s] DMs’. For children and teenagers growing up today, ‘screens’ aren’t recognised as objects in

themselves, but simply the filter through which life is processed. The much discussed PNAS study out this week from researchers at the University of Oxford reflects this truth, and in that

respect, it should be welcomed. Speaking this week, Professor Andrew Przybylski and Amy Orben, the report’s authors, explained that past research on the relationship between screens,

technology and children’s mental health (which claimed to find a negative correlation) was based on limited evidence that failed to give the full picture. According to Przbylski and Orben,

the effect of social media was “not a one-way street”, and rather than obsessing about limiting “screen time”, concerned parents should concentrate their efforts into discovering how their

children are using the internet. They are right to say so. Although social media sites are, of course, all made to be addictive, on most platforms, users are actually given a lot of choice

over what they see and with whom they interact. That means that if you’re a well adjusted, happy, young person, you can (and probably will) turn social media into a place which makes you

even happier. One emotionally mature teenager I spoke to recently recounted how, on becoming self conscious about her own “beach body”, she unfollowed the whole cast of Love Island on

Instagram and replaced them with kitten appreciation accounts. Instead of making her feel bad about herself, scrolling through her Insta now has the effect of giving her a little boost. I

wondered why I’d never thought to do the same… For her and for those like her, social media is almost definitely having a net positive effect (if it is affecting them at all). But for some

teenagers, those already struggling with their mental health, Zuckerberg’s creations are still incredibly dangerous. The tragic case of Molly Russell, the depressed teenager who killed

herself after seemingly becoming lost in a rabbit warren of self harm images on Instagram, proves precisely why. And this is where I part company with Professor Andrew Przybylski and his

team of researchers. Yes, the majority of teenagers may well be “unaffected” by social media use (as the headlines blared this week), but for the minority which are, the effects will be far

from “trivial”. A comparison with alcohol, which, like social media, serves to reinforce the organic emotions of the user, feels appropriate. Whereas a contented, balanced adult may well

feel his/her mood lifted by a glass or two of prosecco drunk in celebration, a teenager who turns to the bottle in a depressive and self-destructive state is deeply unlikely to benefit from

the experience. The notion of screen time has long since been obsolete, and it is true that the term should now be retired. But any parent who reads the headlines this week and decides to

stop monitoring their children’s social media use would be making a grave mistake. Vulnerable young people already prone to self-destructive impulses can all too easily find themselves

trapped in the darkest corners of social media, and more parental vigilance, not less, is what they need.