The relationship between social media and mental distress isn’t as clear-cut as many believe it to be.
, the director of the digital psychiatry division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, told me that all studies of social media use are somewhat incomplete because they are correlational and cross-sectional. “No one’s actually shown the causal evidence that says, ‘If you have X exposure to social media, you have Y detriment to mental health,’ ” he said.
Still, Torous said, certain individuals—his patients included—report increased levels of stress and anxiety after social media use. For some of those users, he’s inclined to believe Snapchat’s new resources are positive, or at least neutral. While some may balk at the idea of staying on an app to receive any kind of mental or emotional support, Torous’ main concerns have to do with data privacy.
“Because so many of these services keep the data to themselves,” he said, “there’s not really very much transparency on what’s happening on these platforms.” Torous used the example of Facebook to illustrate the problems inherent to social media companies keeping tabs on their users’ mental health. In 2018, the New York Timesthat Facebook was running natural language processing to look for key words related to suicide, which on some occasions led to police being sent to users’ homes. In Facebook’s case, there was no informed consent, and the company was essentially running its suicide intervention unchecked.
As for user experience, we don’t have enough information right now to know how effective Snapchat’s interventions will be. But even if the results are positive, Torous cautioned, “[W]e don’t want to conflate this with [saying that] the potential issues of social media for some people and its negative mental impact are now going to be ameliorated, fixed, or addressed. I think it’s adding another kind of unknown into a very complex puzzle.
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