// NATURE NEWS — SPAZIO & SCIENZA
Is social media changing children’s brains? Here’s what the science says
Bianca Nogrady is a freelance science journalist based in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, Australia.
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Scientists say it is important to foster digital literacy and healthy online habits in those growing up using social media.Credit: StockPlanets/E+/Getty
In 1972, sociologist and criminologist Stanley Cohen published a book called Folk Devils and Moral Panics, which explored the concept of moral panic: the idea that societies periodically fixate on a newly emerged condition, behaviour, identity or community as being a threat to the public. The fixation is characterized by ‘handwringing’ and calls to action among societal leaders; a particular pattern of media coverage; and experts breaking down the problem and offering diagnoses and solutions.
Today, concerns about the impact of digital and social media on children and adolescents are never far from the headlines, but there is growing evidence that this isn’t simply another case of moral panic. Politicians, religious leaders and others have been speaking out with increasing intensity about how social media harms young people. And a growing volume of scientific literature is exploring the nature and prevalence of those harms, and what might be done about them1,2.
One thing that differentiates this case from moral panic is that young people themselves are worried, too. “It is not just older generations saying, ‘Kids, get off your screens’,” says Georgia Turner, a neuroscience researcher at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge, UK. Work by Turner and her colleagues suggests that nearly half of adolescents think that they are addicted to social media.
“Whether or not they are correct about the use of the clinical terms, they are clearly unhappy with their screen use,” Turner says. “I would say that we should treat people believing that they have a problem as itself a problem or a concern that we need to try and understand.”
Scientists have directed considerable effort into understanding the nature of screen addiction. “We know that the adolescent period is a time of profound changes in how the brain is developing and responding to its social environment, to peers, to family context,” says psychologist and neuroscientist Eva Telzer, co-director of the Winston National Center on Technology Use, Brain, and Psychological Development at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And now, during that important developmental stage, adolescents are spending more time on digital technology, and in particular on social media.
Concerned about how social media might be affecting children and adolescents, governments around the world are attempting to regulate or curtail its use. Last December, the Australian government implemented a social-media ban for those aged under 16, intended to prevent them from accessing or having accounts on social-media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X. Numerous European countries, including the United Kingdom, France and Italy, are attempting to follow suit.
The situation raises a fundamental question, Telzer says: “How can this social environment potentially be rewiring the developing brain during this really important period when the brain is so sensitive?”