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They are often singled out for their negative impact on the mental health of young people, and yet some social networks are not so harmful. A new study shows that Snapchat stands out from the competition for its positive impact on well-being.
“We found a consistent negative impact of time spent on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube on all three dimensions of mental health. Conversely, time spent on Snapchat had a positive effect on friendships and well-being, but had no significant impact on self-esteem.“, explain researchers from the University of Amsterdam. In the study called “Social Media Use Leads to Negative Mental Health Outcomes for Most Adolescents” (“Social media use leads to negative mental health outcomes for most adolescents”), 479 adolescents were followed for more than 100 days to analyze how the use of social media, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp and YouTube, could affect three key dimensions of adolescent mental health: well-being, self-esteem and friendships.
Results? Snapchat comes out on top. Evan Spiegel’s social network appears to be the least harmful app for teenagers. Despite the time spent on this social network, 71.5% of teenagers felt a positive impact on their friendships, 41.4% reported positive effects on their well-being and 23.7% on self-esteem.
While nearly 60% of the adolescents surveyed said they had felt more negative effects on social networks, 13.6% still indicated that they had been stimulated both positively and negatively.
On average, the teenagers surveyed spent 2 hours and 40 minutes daily on the most used platforms.
The worst: TikTok and YouTube
If Snapchat stands out, the WhatsApp messaging service also does well since, according to the report, the platform strengthens friendly relationships without having either negative or positive effects on well-being and self-esteem: “WhatsApp had a positive impact on friendships for more than three-quarters of teenagers, while an equally large group felt no effect on well-being and self-esteem.“, the researchers emphasize.
At the bottom of the ranking, TikTok and YouTube appear to be the most harmful to the mental health of young users. “TikTok and YouTube users had a more negative experience, with more than two-thirds of them experiencing mainly or exclusively negative effects on all three dimensions of mental health,” the study explains. Instagram does not necessarily do better.For Instagram, we found slightly fewer negative effects and more null effects across all dimensions compared to TikTok and YouTube, but a similarly low number of positive effects (less than 5%)..”
Far from endorsing clichés on the platforms as the only source of negative effects, the study shows that not all social networks are necessarily harmful to the mental health and friendly relationships of users.