Reacción a "A study claims that social media bans for teenagers lack evidence and may carry risks"

This article is written by a team led by Candice L. Odgers, one of the most skeptical authors regarding the usefulness of social media bans and, in general, regarding the evidence on the impact of social media on adolescent mental health.

The article is neither a systematic review nor a meta-analysis. Instead, it draws on two previous meta-analyses of experimental studies—randomized controlled trials on restricting access to social media—that have measured the impact on different aspects of mental health. They start from the premise that almost all the evidence on the relationship between mental health or social media use and mental health is correlational research, and that from this research it is practically impossible to conclude that social media has a causal impact on mental health, both adolescent and adult, and that, obviously, this implies the need for experimental studies. Hence the motivation for conducting the review specifically on studies with this methodology.

In other words, they don't delve too deeply into purely correlational studies, because they understand that these studies have inherent limitations that are very difficult to overcome, and therefore they focus solely on experimental studies.

A significant limitation of this article is that it could essentially be considered an interpretive or narrative review. They also don't perform a quantitative synthesis or a quality analysis of each of these studies. That is, all they do is identify and count the studies that have been conducted, both those included in previous meta-analyses and those they have found new, and briefly summarize the characteristics and conclusions of each, along with the overall conclusion, which is something we already knew: that the evidence is mixed, that the effects found are generally modest, and that the methodology is highly variable.

Another important element is that these types of interventions, unfortunately, cannot be subjected to a double-blind procedure, because obviously the participants in these studies know that they are participating in a study intended to see whether or not limiting access to social media has an impact on their mental health, and therefore, this generates expectancy effects.

And the most important limitation that this team describes for justifying regulations on the use of social media in adolescents is that none of these studies were conducted with adolescents. They are studies generally carried out with an adult population. In some studies, there are participants under the age of 18; the youngest participants they have identified are 16 years old. Therefore, any findings in these studies could hardly be generalized in one way or another to the adolescent population.

In practical terms, what this means is that the scientific evidence available at this time does not support the usefulness of the measures being taken in countries like Australia and those planned for countries like Great Britain or Spain. Regulators are rushing to ban social media up to a certain age, in most cases up to 16, believing this can have a positive impact on adolescents' mental health. However, we currently lack evidence to support the effectiveness of this measure. Above all, there is no evidence to support its effectiveness compared to other options, such as regulating how social media operates without resorting to a total ban. They also argue that, aside from the lack of evidence regarding the potential positive impacts of social media bans, the potential negative impacts and practical difficulties of implementing such a ban have not yet been adequately assessed. Furthermore, they point out that limiting or completely prohibiting adolescents' access to social media could restrict rights, such as access to support networks or certain social, psychological, or emotional resources that might be important for these young people.

Finally, they emphasize the importance of evaluating the impacts of these measures in a methodologically sound and systematic way. Why? Because by definition, when legislation is applied in a jurisdiction, there is no control group. That is, all we can observe is how certain aspects of mental health or adolescent functioning change from before to after, but a simple change without a control group is not a powerful methodology for establishing the causal impact of a policy.

There are methodologies that do allow us to approach making a causal inference, but they are complex and require that these policies be implemented with the intention of conducting an impact assessment. Typically, in the minds of legislators, or of the governments and institutions that implement these policies, impact assessment is not a priority, or perhaps there is a lack of awareness regarding the importance of implementing these policies in a particular way so that solid inferences can later be drawn from the observed changes.

Therefore, in summary, I believe that the article provides a fairly objective and comprehensive overview of the available evidence on what we know (which is actually quite limited) about the impact that measures prohibiting or limiting the use of social media might have on adolescent mental health, which currently places us in a position of great uncertainty. In that sense, I agree with the study's conclusions, but at the same time, I acknowledge that it is not particularly strong from a methodological standpoint. Ultimately, what it presents is a specific position from a very specific group of academic authors, with whom I tend to agree, but it doesn't offer much new information beyond what was already known because it doesn't use a rigorous review methodology.

Therefore, it remains an informed opinion piece that warns us of the need to be much more systematic and careful than we have been to date, and that offers some recommendations that I find very sound on how to implement regulations regarding the use of social media in adolescence and how to measure their impact. Beyond that, I don't think it's an article whose novelty would have justified its publication in a more prestigious journal, and that's probably why it's published in a Frontiers journal and not in a public health journal with greater scientific prestige.