A Brown assistant professor with over 50 peer-reviewed publications, Jacqueline Nesi has garnered extensive media attention for her work studying the impacts of social media on adolescent mental health. As a researcher passionate about bringing her work into the public forum, Jacqueline Nesi has testified before congressional subcommittees; appeared on news outlets such as CNBC, CNN, and NPR; and frequently speaks at schools, conferences, and other organizations. She has also spent the past three years delivering research-backed guidance to over 36,000 subscribers through the newsletter, “Techno Sapiens.”
Ariella Reynolds: You’ve written extensively on the associations between social media and its impacts on adolescent well-being, social development, and emotional regulation. Just how bad is social media for adolescents? Is it the end of the world, as we know it, for adaptive teenage behavior? Or is there hope here?
Jacqueline Nesi: This is a great place to start off, because I think that the narrative we tend to hear, in the media and elsewhere, would suggest that social media is bad and that that’s settled in the science; that it’s very clear that social media is having a very negative outcome on young people. But I actually think that the research is a bit more complicated than that. A lot more complicated, actually.
We know that there are real risks when it comes to social media. There are certainly challenges, and for some adolescents, social media can be really problematic. We also know that there can be some benefits to social media use centered around social connection when it comes to forming communities, or exploring interests.
I think what the research boils down to is this: The effects of social media depend on how it’s being used, what specific behaviors and experiences young people are having on there. And it depends on the individual adolescent: Not every kid is responding to social media in the same way.
AR: I know you also discussed social media’s mixed effects in a piece that you published for the North Carolina Medical Journal, in 2020. But here we are, well after the height of Covid. To what extent have things changed since you published that article, and what role has Covid played in that?
JN: Yeah, things have changed a lot since Covid. In terms of just thinking about the larger landscape of issues with social media and mental health, we’re seeing a lot more legislation being proposed. I think this has just become even more of a national conversation than it was then. During Covid, we saw an increase in the use of all screen media among everyone, including adolescents. There was a sense that adolescents needed to be using social media in order to have some kind of outlet to stay socially connected to the wider world during Covid. We’re still trying to figure out the new normal after that: What amount of time on social media is appropriate? To what extent is it necessary and when? What benefits are adolescents still getting and not getting from social media, and how can we maximize those while minimizing the risks? I think those are all questions that are still being answered.
AR: In terms of maintaining those social connections through social media, now that so much content on social media is artificially generated by algorithms, rather than created by human beings, how might that change social media’s ability to connect us with each other?
JN: I think that with the rise of generative AI, we’re definitely at a turning point in terms of technology. I don’t think we know how that’s going to shape particularly the social media platforms that we know and recognize right now, but I certainly think that it’s going to have a major impact. We know that social media is at its best in terms of impacts on wellbeing when it’s supporting humans, and young people in particular, in connecting with each other. To the extent that social media continues to move away from that goal and more toward the passive consumption of content, particularly if that content is not human generated, I think there can be benefits and good things to that, that we don’t know about yet. It’s really hard to predict. However, I do think that we need to maintain some aspect of that social connection piece, because I think that’s really important for thinking about the benefits of social media.
AR: The idea of that social connection piece being so integral, reminded me of how so many people currently view platforms like Myspace and Vine through a very nostalgic lens, mostly because they see those platforms as better suited for shaping authentic social connection than the ones we have now. Do you believe this to be the case, and if so, do you think our online authenticity will continue to trend downward? Would this comparative lack of authenticity have implications for our social connections?
JN: I think there’s always a tendency to glamorize or be nostalgic for what existed before. There were a lot of problems with the internet and some of the platforms many years ago, which we kind of forget about. But my guess is that we’ll see changes in both directions: We’ll see people developing platforms and using these technologies in ways that promote social connection, both on- and off-line. And I’m sure we’ll see the opposite, as well: Movement away from that, and more toward AI-generated content and continued passive consumption without a social piece to it. With any big change in one direction, there’s always a counter movement. Anecdotally, I certainly hear from a lot of young people who are very interested in being their authentic selves online, and who are connecting with one another in authentic ways, which represents this sort of backlash against AI.
AR: Coming back to social media’s pro-social benefits, in your article titled “#Grateful” in the Journal of Research on Adolescence, you found a kind of virtuous cycle for social media and gratitude during Covid. Could you walk us through that?
JN: This was a study that was led by my colleague Annie Mayhew, who’s at the University of North Carolina now. Essentially, what we found was that adolescents who were experiencing and expressing more gratitude, were motivated to use social media to make meaningful connections with friends. Now, the relationship between those concepts is probably somewhat complex. But in general, that’s what the results seem to indicate.
AR: So now that we know this, what advice would you give to educators or policymakers about the potential for social media? Put another way, how can we guide adolescents to more prosocial and meaningful uses of social media?
JN: I think it starts with media literacy, with teaching adolescents about these technologies, particularly as they continue to change and as we see the rise of new technologies. I think we really do need to be entering these conversations regularly. And that requires a certain amount of learning on adults’ part, as well, in terms of learning how to use these technologies effectively and in healthy ways. And then one of the major principles I would think about with this, is teaching adolescents to be mindful about the ways they use technology: So many of our technologies are built to be used mindlessly, without a lot of decision making. We’re being fed information by an algorithm, and we don’t have much of a choice within that algorithm. We’re oftentimes using our devices in ways that are very automatic, because they’re designed to be used with very little friction. But what we want to teach adolescents is, as much as possible, to take a step back and really think intentionally about how they’re using their technology, what is working for them, what’s making them feel good, what they want to continue. On the other hand, what’s not working for them? What is making them feel worse? What’s getting in the way? And just taking that first step to really think through, “how am I using this and is it working for me or not?”—I think that can go a long way. And then, of course, along with that, we’d want to be teaching some strategies around how to actually make changes when they want to do so.
AR: What do you think about nudges or design friction as a way to get to this form of mindfulness? Or do you think that that’s just another passive way of subverting the conscious mind?
JN: That’s a good question. I think it probably depends a little bit on what the nudge is. Let’s take the example of screen time limits: Screen time limits, as they’re currently set up, look like setting a one hour limit on your TikTok use, and then you get to an hour and TikTok says, “Hey, you’ve reached your limit. Do you want to stop?” And you can choose to say “no” or “yes.” You can dismiss it and keep going.
There’s some evidence that when screen time limits are set up that way, that they not only don’t work, but they can actually increase the amount of time that we spend on these platforms. And the reason comes down to this interesting concept called budgeting: When we set an hour as our screen time limit, we then think, “okay, I’ve got a full hour to spend on this technology before I’ve reached my limit.” And so we feel totally fine spending that time, even if previously, we would have spent less time and then we feel like, “okay, I can go a little bit over that; that’s not going to matter too much.” And then we just dismiss the notification and keep going. So we really have to be intentional: If we want a screen time limit to work, it has to be more like setting it way below the time that we would normally spend. And we also have to make it less easy to dismiss in many cases, something where we actually can’t just get rid of it and keep going. And so the devil is really in the details when it comes to these design changes and nudges, because something that intuitively would seem like a good idea can actually backfire if it’s not done well.
AR: It sounds like a lot of people might relate to that screen time budgeting example: I remember you talking about that very concept in “Techno Sapiens,” your newsletter, which has over 36,000 subscribers, and hits a sweet spot intersecting parenting psychology and technology. I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about it: What motivated you to start writing it, and how do you think it’s evolved?
JN: “Techno Sapiens” is a newsletter on Substack, a newsletter platform. I started it about three years ago, and I write about the research on a number of areas: psychology, technology, and parenting are the main ones. And I started it because I had been doing research in this world for a while, and I was just feeling a little bit frustrated with the ability to share what I was learning with the outside world, outside of academia. I felt like I was writing academic papers and applying for grants—which are all really important—but I didn’t feel like they were getting to the people that needed the information: to parents, for example, who really wanted to know, “how can I help my child navigate the digital world more safely and in healthy ways?” So, I decided to experiment with doing some writing for more of a public audience, and it felt like a newsletter was a good way to do that. Since then, I’ve been writing about once a week and the audience has grown. It’s something I enjoy doing and that I hope is helping to get the word out about what the science actually says on some of these topics that we hear a lot about.
AR: And how has that changed over time? Have the topics that you’re covering changed or the ways in which you’re covering them?
JN: I think it’s definitely changed. When I started the newsletter, I had just become a parent myself. Now I have a three and a half year old and a one and a half year old. So, I think I’ve started to incorporate more of my own experience of parenting into my writing and into my understanding of the research.
As the audience has grown, I’ve also expanded it a bit into other areas of psychology, parenting, and technology. I still write a lot about specifically how to manage our kids’ technology use as parents, but I also write about a lot of other topics. And that came from the audience’s desire to see how to apply research alongside practical tips in other areas beyond just managing smartphones and social media.
AR: Now, I want to ask about your input on this situation that I witnessed a few days ago: I was having dinner with my parents in a downtown restaurant, and we sat adjacent to a large party celebrating a birthday, and there were four kids among that party interspersed among the adults. I could see that all four of them had been paired up with iPads, and nothing was going to come between them and their screens. And I read a blog post from “Techno Sapiens” about kids and iPads, which walks through the pros and cons from a research perspective and a real world parenting perspective. So, I have two questions on this: One, how difficult is it to come from the empirical discipline of psychology research and try to bring that to the lab of day to day parenting, if you will?
JN: I would say that it’s both easy and hard. It’s hard in that, of course, we don’t have great data to guide us in every single parenting decision that we will make. In fact, with most parenting decisions we make, we do not have great data to guide us. And so there is a certain amount of relying on the general principles of what we know from the research and then also empowering parents to take what they know from their situation, what they know of their child and themselves, and then integrate what we know from the research into that.
I think it’s easy in that we do know a lot from the research in terms of general principles, in terms of what works and what doesn’t work. There are always insights that we can take from the empirical data and apply. They just might not always get us to the exact answer in every single situation.
AR: And at the same time, it’s been over two years since that post. So while these general principles are solid, do you have any updates on them?
JN: Specifically with the question of our kids using iPads at the table, I don’t think so; the general principles still remain. I think this is a question where if our kids are on their devices at every meal and are never learning the skills of interacting socially at the table, they’re never learning the self-regulation of how to stay calm and quiet at a restaurant. Then that’s a problem, right? They’re never having the time to interact with us. If mealtimes are a key time for us to be interacting socially as a family, that’s a problem, if it’s interfering in that way. But if, for whatever reason, it makes sense to have our kids using a device during dinner at a restaurant every once in a while, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. And I think this is a good situation where we as parents see a lot of information on social media, so what we do is influenced by that. There’s a lot of judgment, a lot of strong statements about what’s okay and what’s not okay. The question about using devices at the dinner table is one question where there are a lot of opinions. And I think that sometimes we just have to come back to this kind of common sense idea where doing it a lot is probably not great, but once in a while it’s probably fine. And we never know what particular circumstances are going on for a given family or a given child that would make this make sense in one situation or another.
AR: It sounds like moderation is key.
JN: Moderation, I think, is always key.
AR: It also seems like this is a very universal issue for parents. And so that does make me wonder, is this one of those rare bipartisan issues where we can see people on both sides of the aisle getting behind the attempt to understand what healthy screen time looks like? Do you see more effort from one side or another?
JN: With some of the legislative proposals that have been put forth around kids’ online safety, they generally are relatively bipartisan, more so than other issues. I think the particular issues and concerns that the different parties have, of course, differ. But I think we generally want kids to be safe online, and what that looks like in practice is a little harder to pin down. And some of the rhetoric around kids’ online safety within the political sphere, is very fear based and a bit alarmist compared to what we actually know from the data and the research. That’s something to be careful of. But in general, I think that in many cases, this is a somewhat bipartisan issue.
AR: Switching gears a bit to a more polarized view of social media, we’re seeing a lot of research emerging on the role of social media in domestic radicalization – that the use of social media has been a “cause and consequence,” as one article put it, of the radicalization of far right extremists, for example. So, do you believe that social media is a force multiplier of radicalization or just a mediator of it?
JN: I wouldn’t say my expertise is really in this area, so I can’t comment specifically on social media’s role in radicalization. What I will say is that I think social media can be an amplifier of many things, and there are a lot of features of social media that make it likely to be an amplifier in that. For example, it’s more public than our general conversations in person—things can go viral quickly and widely, and they tend to be permanent.
AR: And do you see that amplifier as being more positive or more negative? And how do you think that will change over time?
JN: I think it can be both positive and negative. For example, with a social cause that’s important or in the face of a natural disaster, like with the wildfires in California [in January of this year], there can be benefits to that amplifying effect: The word can get out quickly. Communities who need help can maybe access that on a wider scale. Of course, there are real risks though to that, too: Misinformation can spread more quickly. More extreme views and opinions can get amplified or get more airtime than they normally would.
AR: And as you continue to evaluate teens’ relationship with technology and social media, and look to the future, where are the big red warning signs? In which areas should we be the most vigilant when it comes to social media? It sounds like this double-edged sword.
JN: I think there are two basic categories of risk that are worth thinking about for adolescents and social media. One is just the time spent and when that starts to become problematic. If it starts to interfere with other aspects of an adolescent’s life that are important for supporting wellbeing and mental health—so, if it’s getting in the way of sleep or time spent socialising in-person—that’s something I think we need to look out for.
The second category is more content-related: What are they consuming? Is it good or not so good? And we know that there’s a lot of negative and harmful content that is out there that we probably need to be careful of. As we see the technology changing and with more generative AI coming down the pipeline—besides what already exists—I also think there’s probably some awareness that’s needed around how adolescents are engaging with generative AI. I think that chatbots serving different purposes—whether that be emotional support, friendship, or therapy—are going to become more and more prominent and already are being used by some adolescents. And so I do think that will be something for us just to be aware of and be careful of in terms of when it’s benefiting them and when it’s not.
AR: On the other hand, where should we maybe take a beat and explore massive opportunities for advancement as a species? You mentioned that this idea of AI as therapy could be either really good or really bad for teenagers, depending on how it’s used. So, could you see that pattern in a lot of other areas where it seems like it could be a real problem, but maybe it could also really benefit us?
JN: Yeah, absolutely. I think that when it comes to generative AI, the change we’re seeing in the advancement in technology is unlike anything we’ve seen in a long time. It’s hard to predict what that will mean, both good and bad. But I do think that technology has the potential to change—and is already changing—our lives in so many ways, and has the potential to have major positive impacts in terms of everything from finding cures for diseases, to offering more personalized medicine in different areas, or solving different issues that have so far been intractable societally. I think there’s a ton of potential that we may not even be considering. But along with that, of course, I do think there are very real risks. I think it’s going to be a matter of trying to keep up with the changes and advancements that are happening so quickly, while making sure that we are keeping young people safe.
AR: Do you think the research should focus more on the risks or the benefits? And what would be the pitfalls or the advantages of focusing on one or the other?
JN: In clinical psychology research, where I am, we do often focus on mental disorders and disease, and that means a lot of focus generally on risks. Still, I think there’s a movement toward focusing on resilience factors and more positive psychology generally. If we want to get the full picture, I think we need to understand both sides of the coin.
AR: And what are you working on now? What kinds of questions are you passionate about exploring in the future, either through your research or “Techno Sapiens”?
JN: Within my research, I have a somewhat new grant from the National Institute of Mental Health that involves studying social media use among adolescents with some history of internalizing symptoms, which are symptoms of anxiety and depression. So, I’m interested in how those adolescents are using social media, but also in how it impacts them, and what their beliefs about social media look like. I’m really interested in studying the kinds of messages that young people get from the media, from adults, and from their peers, about social media, and the impact of social media on mental health. I think a lot of what we hear is very negative, and so I’m curious about how an adolescent’s beliefs affect the ways that they use social media, and then ultimately the impact it has on them. So if they come in thinking, “this is bad for me, there’s nothing I can do to use it in healthier ways, but I still have to use it if I want to be social,” I would hypothesize that this means that they would likely use it in ways that are less healthy for them, and that it may have a more negative impact long-term. I’m hoping that by understanding that a little bit better, we can figure out what the right messaging is for young people when it comes to social media, what social media means for their mental health, and how to use it in healthier ways.
AR: That sounds like a really interesting study. And I’m wondering: How accurate, on the whole, do you think teens’ beliefs about social media use are going to be?
JN: We’ve seen some surveys that ask teens, for example, “What kind of impact do you think social media has on your mental health?” What’s interesting is that generally, teens report that they think that social media has a negative impact on their peers’ mental health, but not for themselves.
AR: Why do you think that is?
JN: I would hypothesize that that’s a function of the messages that they’re getting, right? They’re being told social media is bad for people your age; it’s bad for their mental health. And maybe they also see some examples of areas where their peers have had difficulties with social media, but for themselves, maybe they just don’t see that as much, either because it’s not true or because they’re not as aware of it. So, I think it will be interesting to see what the data show.
AR: Absolutely. I’m looking forward to reading that study when it’s published. Now, if you had a choice, where would you take the field of social media research and studying social media’s impacts on adolescents? Where would you focus all of your efforts, or maybe everyone’s collective efforts, if you could?
JN: In general, I think, in this field, we’re a little bit stuck in answering a question, which is basically, “is social media good or bad?” It’s this big vague question that I really don’t think we’re ever going to get an answer to because the answer is “both,” right? It can be good or bad. Instead, I think we’re starting to move and need to move more in the direction of understanding whom social media is good or bad for and in what circumstances. What are the behaviors and experiences that are good versus bad, or somewhere in between in many cases? For which adolescents, and how can we support those adolescents that are particularly at risk?
AR: And what are some of those risk factors? Is there any way to determine who’s going to be impacted and who isn’t?
JN: I think so. What the data so far would suggest, generally, is that teens who are vulnerable in different ways in their offline lives—like, for example, teens who might have pre-existing mental health concerns, teens who might be marginalized in some way in their offline lives, like LGBTQ teens, or teens who are maybe socially struggling a bit more in their offline lives—those teens report that they are running into more of the risks of the online world. They’re having more challenges online, but in the data, often we see that those teens are also reporting that they’re getting more of the benefits. So they’re seeing more opportunities to connect and relying on social media more for various benefits. And so, I think it’s a double-edged sword for most teens, but especially for teens who are vulnerable in various ways.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.