Happiness and social media.

 

Heavy users of social media are at risk, especially in English-speaking countries and Western Europe.

In North America and Western Europe, young people are much less happy than 15 years ago. Over the same period, social media use has greatly increased. Many people blame social media for this fall in happiness, but does this hypothesis stand the test of rigorous scientific analysis? What about the rest of the world, where young people’s happiness has not declined relative to adults, even though social media is equally prevalent? There has been much research on this topic. This report does not attempt a comprehensive synthesis of the academic literature – for that, we refer you to the studies listed at the end of this chapter.1 Instead, we started by asking two leading critics of social media, Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch, to lay out their case (see Chapter 3). They offer two main types of analysis. First, they report what young people, their parents, their teachers, and employees of social media companies have said about social media and adolescent wellbeing. The views they report are generally negative. Then they turn to the academic evidence, chiefly from the United States, for the causal impact of social media use on wellbeing, which they argue supports their case. Once we had the outline of the Haidt and Rausch chapter, we issued a call for papers that could provide further perspective on these issues, including experiences in different parts of the world. The PISA study of 15-year-olds in 47 countries shows that those who use social media for over seven hours a day have much lower wellbeing than those who use it for less than one hour. For girls in Western Europe, the difference is almost a full point (out of 10), almost twice that for girls elsewhere. For boys, the drop is almost half a point in Western Europe, and essentially zero in the other 35 countries (see Chapter 2 and Chapter 5). In a sample of US college students, the majority wish that social media platforms did not exist. They use them because others are using them, but they would prefer it if no one did (see Chapter 6). Outside the English-speaking world and Western Europe, the links between social media use and wellbeing are more positive, and they vary between platforms. Data from Latin America show that platforms with algorithmic feeds and featuring influencers are more likely to be negatively linked to life satisfaction than those that mainly facilitate communication (see Chapter 2). In the Middle East and North Africa, youth wellbeing has not fallen despite heavy use of social media. This must have many causes. But there, too, heavy social media use is associated with higher levels of depression and stress. The most problematic platforms are those where the main use is passive, and the main material is visual (encouraging social comparisons) and often comes from influencers (see Chapter 9). From all this, we conclude that heavy users of social media are at risk, especially in Englishspeaking countries and Western Europe. Does this mean that social media use fully explains the worrying decline in youth wellbeing in those regions? Of course not. The trends are caused by many factors, which differ between continents. However, the evidence in this report does suggest that heavy social media use, especially in some countries, provides an important part of the explanation. This brings us to the policy debate. As Chapter 4 points out, this requires the highest standards of synthesis. The authors show how major public reports on this issue have reached different conclusions and policy recommendations, despite examining similar research. In December 2025, the Australian government increased the age limit for ten social media platforms from 13 to 16.3 Other countries, including Denmark, France, and Spain, are planning similar regulation. We hope that the evidence in this volume will help policy-makers in their assessment of such policies. In the sections that follow, we present summaries of each chapter in the report.

World Happiness Report 2026 - Chapter 1 - happiness and social media.