Social networks are often criticised for their negative impact on young people’s mental health – yet some may be less harmful than others. In fact, a new study reports that one platform in particular stands out from the crowd for its positive impact on wellbeing.
“We found a consistent negative impact of time spent on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube across all three mental health dimensions. Conversely, spending time on Snapchat positively affected friendship closeness and wellbeing but had no significant impact on self-esteem,” researchers at the University of Amsterdam explained in their paper.
The researchers studied 479 young people over 100 days to analyse how the use of social networks – TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp and YouTube – could affect three key dimensions of teenagers’ mental health: wellbeing, self-esteem and friendships.
And in their findings, Snapchat came out on top: Evan Spiegel’s social network appears to be the least harmful social app for teenagers. When spending time on this platform, 71.5% of teenagers felt a positive impact on their friendships, 41.4% reported positive effects on their wellbeing, and 23.7% on their self-esteem.
On average, the teenagers surveyed spent 2 hours 40 minutes a day on the most popular platforms. While 60% of the teenagers surveyed said they had experienced mostly negative effects on social networks, 13.6% said they had been stimulated both positively and negatively.
A different story for TikTok and YouTube
While Snapchat stands out in particular, WhatsApp also scores well since, according to the report, the platform appears to strengthen friendly relationships without having either negative or positive effects.
“WhatsApp impacted friendship closeness positively for more than three-quarters of adolescents, while a similarly large group experienced no effect on wellbeing and self-esteem,” the researchers highlighted.
Meanwhile, TikTok and YouTube appear to be the most damaging to the mental health of young users. “TikTok and YouTube users experienced more negative unity, with over two-thirds experiencing predominantly or exclusively negative effects on the three dimensions of mental health,” the researchers noted.
Meanwhile, “for Instagram, we found slightly fewer negative effects and more null effects across dimensions compared to TikTok and YouTube, but a similarly low number of positive effects (less than 5%)”, they added.
Far from lending weight to clichés about platforms only being a source of negative effects, the study shows that not all social networks are necessarily harmful to users’ mental health and friendships.