Social Media Use and adolescents' mental health and well-being: An umbrella review

Abstract

This umbrella review analyses the risks and opportunities for adolescents' mental health and well-being associated with Social Media Use (SMU) and the main risk mitigation proposals presented in systematic, scoping and narrative literature reviews and meta-analyses. Following the PRIOR guidelines, we defined inclusion and exclusion criteria for Population (10-19 years), Exposure (Social Media Use) and Outcomes (Well-being, Ill-being, Mental health) and searched articles published from January 2015 to April 2023 in four databases: Scopus, Web of Science, PsychInfo, and Pubmed. We screened titles and abstracts of 1470 publications, and after conducting the quality assessment based on the AMSTAR 2 protocol, we selected 24 articles on which we performed a thematic analysis. We highlight that the relationship between SMU and adolescents' mental health is influenced by several intervening factors: 1) individual demographic and psycho-socio characteristics, 2) individual use of Social Media (SM), and 3) SM' content and design. Furthermore, we describe the risks and opportunities associated with SMU that emerge from the reviewed articles. We discuss how the limitation to collecting SM data hinders the research on the impact of SMU and how the adoption of responsible design principles by SM platforms would contribute to introducing a societal change to achieve a population-level shift, which is harder to attain if the burden of responsible use is only attributed to individuals' choices. Finally, we discuss the opportunities brought about by upcoming regulatory frameworks, such as the EU Digital Services Act.