International Day of Happiness

  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 employe...

  The relationship between social media and happiness is contingent upon both platform design and the broader cultural and social context in which social media use takes place. Key Insights  Trends in global happiness  • Nordic countries lead the happiness rankings once again. Finland is still in a group of one at the top, followed by a group of three: Iceland, Denmark, and Costa Rica. Sweden and Norway complete the top six, followed by the Netherlands, Israel, Luxembourg, and Switzerland to round out the top ten. Costa Rica’s rise to 4th marks the highest ever ranking for a Latin American country. • Looking at changes in happiness from the 2006–2010 base period to 2023–2025, there are more countries with significant gains (79) than with significant losses (41), among the 136 countries ranked. • Within that period, most of the 21 countries that have gained a point or more on the 0–10 life evaluation scale are in Central and Eastern Europe, reflecting the convergence in E...

So where do digital media products fall on this spectrum? Are they more like bicycles or guns? Key Insights  Is social media use reasonably safe for children and adolescents ? We call this the “product safety question”, and we present seven lines of evidence showing that the answer is no. The evidence of harm is found in: 1) surveys of young people; 2) surveys of parents, teachers, and clinicians; 3) contents from corporate documents; 4) findings from cross-sectional studies; 5) findings from longitudinal studies; 6) findings from social media reduction experiments ; and 7) findings from natural experiments. We show there is now overwhelming evidence of severe and widespread direct harms (such as sextortion and cyberbullying), and compelling evidence of troubling indirect harms (such as depression and anxiety). Furthermore, we show that the harms and risks to individual users are so diverse and vast in scope that they justify the view that social media is causing harm at a popul...