This source is from the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, an independent body that publishes expert committee consensus reports.

The committee reviewed research on adolescent mental and physical health outcomes linked to social media use, including depression, anxiety, sleep, diet, and activity indicators.

The chapter explains that studies show mixed and often small associations, and that social media exposure is not one single behavior. Effects can differ across teens and contexts.

Its bottom-line conclusion is that the reviewed literature did not support saying social media causes population-level changes in adolescent health.

This evidence is a peer-reviewed Nature Human Behaviour paper by Amy Orben and Andrew K. Przybylski from the University of Oxford and the Oxford Internet Institute.

The study re-analyzed three large social datasets with a total sample of 355,358 adolescents from the UK and the US.

Methodology used specification-curve analysis, which tests all reasonable analytic choices instead of reporting only one preferred model. This reduces cherry-picking risk and shows how stable a result is across many valid specifications.

Across analyses, the association between digital technology use and adolescent well-being was negative but very small, accounting for at most 0.4% of well-being differences.

This is a peer-reviewed Scientific Reports study by researchers from the University of Amsterdam and Tilburg University.

The team ran a preregistered experience-sampling design with 63 adolescents aged 14 to 15. Participants completed phone surveys six times per day for one week, producing 2,155 real-time assessments.

The analysis estimated person-specific effects instead of assuming one average effect for all teens, so it could test whether responses differ by individual.

Results were mixed: 44.26% of adolescents showed no well-being change after passive social media use, 45.90% showed a small positive association, and 9.84% showed a small negative association.