In this seminar, I present compelling evidence about the impact of unregulated social media use on youth. It is particularly valuable for educators, mental health professionals, parents, and policymakers seeking evidence-based perspectives on digital wellness and the rationale behind Australia's groundbreaking social media legislation. I advocate for a multi-layered approach including age restrictions (particularly under-16), platform accountability, parent education, and healthcare provider awareness.
Drawing from my decades of experience treating anxiety disorders, I systematically examine claims that social media prevents suicide, reduces loneliness, and supports minority groups, revealing significant flaws in the research cited to support these positions. Using real-world examples from schools and the trans-diagnostic theory of uncertainty, I demonstrate how social media use intersects with cyberbullying, anxiety disorders, and developmental challenges.
Opening and Acknowledgments
Professor Warren Mansell: Thanks everybody for coming here today it's lots of familiar faces really good to see people just so focus on this really important topic I first like to acknowledge that this is the land of the people of the Nunggar nation the original custodians I want to pay respect to elders past present and future and also everyone who has a heritage from an Aboriginal or Strait Islander background welcome you here today
Personally I believe that the oral face-to-face oral storytelling tradition and the sort of ancient connection with the land is actually two of the best antidotes to the kind of tide of information technology that we're talking about today It's amazing that Danielle's here today I've been working together with Danielle in one form or another for about the last decade I first came to know her through the Australian Association of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy the AACBT then I supported her to complete a theory paper on uncertainty and anxiety based now on perceptual control theory which I've mentioned to many of you here today. Professor Pete McCoy was also a reviewer for that theoretical work and Pete's worked with Dani for her work with schools mental health interventions in schools and together we've got a paper that came out last year in Prevention Sciences on that approach.
Dr Danielle Einstein started her career as the Head of the Anxiety Clinic at Westmead Hospital in Sydney about 30 years ago. She's worked as a Clinical Psychologist with patients and as a Researcher since then. She co-authored one of the first online social phobia programs with Professor Nick Titov and she also developed a therapist supported internet intervention for comorbid anxiety and depression with Ron Rapee and Caroline Schnering. She's been a leader in this space for the last few years. In 2023 she delivered the Professor Margot Prior lecture to the Australian Clinical Psychology Association, this was on how poor research on device use could be misleading both clinicians and researchers in terms of their work with young people and that same year she chaired the panel at the AACBT national conference questioning what school programs can do in the well-being space.
So because of that research, and because of her role in calling for a ban on phones in schools. Danielle was interviewed by the Former Chief Justice of Australia and that was for the review of the potential social media legislation that you'll be aware of, and so Danielle proceeded to educate her colleagues, was an invited expert for New South Wales and South Australia for their social media summits and then from that she was invited to Australian Parliament House on three separate occasions where she provided evidence that was crucial for the social media legislation that marks out Australia as the first country to have the potential to fine organisations if they breach the social media recommendations for young people.
Danielle actually put her testimony for that on YouTube and it was ironic because Dani doesn't use social media herself [much], so she didn't realize that throughout the world people were saying that there's no Australian researcher that's backing this legislation! Actually, it was out there -and she's here today and she's advocating for a well-thought-out multi-layered approach to dealing with devices and social media.
Main Presentation
Thanks so much, I've come to talk to you today and I guess part of it - started the year in London and I went to York and to King's College and I was meeting with addiction psychiatrists, statisticians, researchers in psychology just to find out what their view was of what we're doing in Australia. And I was really fascinated because I was standing there talking to one research psychologist and there was a second person who had introduced me, and the research psychologist had an opinion on what's going on (and I'm talking today about unregulated social media) - and the other person was a reviewer for one of the main journals and he really didn't know anything about it so he was just kind of listening.
And I was fascinated at their take and their discussion with me which ended up being ‘We think this is about American researchers who want to sell their books - and they were talking about Professor Twenge and Jonathan Haidt’ so I just want to start by saying I've got nothing to do with Jonathan Haidt, my work has come from a completely different place - it comes from the work on uncertainty and back when I did my PhD at the same time as being Head of the Anxiety Clinic at Westmead Hospital I was looking at commercial determinants of health.
So my area was in treating OCD and what I was interested in was whether I could work with an OCD client to help them understand their dislike of uncertainty. They're knocking on wood,for instance because they don't like uncertainty or they're washing their hands excessively because they're worried about the germs and they don't like the uncertainty of not knowing if they're going to get sick. Whether or not I could use examples of companies taking advantage of that dislike of uncertainty to try and sell them a solution to make them feel better so I started that there in the early 2000s late 1990s - it sounds like a long time ago.
Then sort of jump forward to 2011 I gave a pub talk in Sydney for the AACBT where I've been working on this theory of uncertainty for some time and that connects in with generalized anxiety disorder and worry which I'm not going to talk about right now because it's another whole long spiel. But what I will say is that having given that talk and then writing that paper that Warren mentioned I was asked to do research with schools and I wanted to do that research because I actually thought ‘hang on a second, teenagers everywhere are now getting phones. They're getting hand-me-down phones from their parents they've got smartphones in the early years of high school. And at the same time schools are also doing these things to stamp out uncertainty.
So let's just think about what a phone does the moment you have a doubt - you can pick up your phone and get the answer or you can get reassurance from mum or dad - so we've got a change in the way we have to handle uncertainty by the fact that we've got a portable device on us and we've got schools now incentivised by marketing - and by parents - to send out class lists, for example, before the year begins - ‘Let's make your child more comfortable -I'll tell you who's going to be in the class. Again in many many different ways stamping out uncertainty for children.
So what I thought and what I was doing with schools was working with teachers and with psychologists to see if we could get into schools language about understanding not to try and get rid of uncertainty - to embrace uncertainty so to speak - and that language is definitely out there in schools both in Australia and now around the world and that was much before COVID even though with COVID, all of a sudden everyone understood how important uncertainty was.
So I started there Professor Donna Cross actually introduced me to a school Principal in Sydney where there had been several suicides and I was employed by that school to spend a few months looking at social emotional mental health programs - to see what's the evidence there for those programs ‘Is there strong evidence for them - What should those schools be using and I was lucky enough to spend a few months just reading and deconstructing the evidence that's around for universal prevention programs and other types of well-being programs in schools.’
And from that I then went on - all the while seeing clients - I’d written a book called ‘The Dip’ which is actually what I tried to do in 2019 - write a very short book (that parents could read on the toilet) so that they would understand the dopamine pull - and this issue of uncertainty - dislike of uncertainty because I was still concerned that there was going to be a problem with mental health as we stamp out uncertainty because Pete McCoy's one of his really important research - with Alison Mahoney had been showing that if you don't like uncertainty you're at a greater risk for having more psychological disorders going together.
So the more you say you don't like surprises, the more you want to be organised in advance the more likely you are [likely] to have both an anxiety disorder and an eating disorder and a depression or three types of anxiety disorders going together.
So for a very long time I've been sort of trying to do work to get the community to recognise this and to see if we could work through educational initiatives to change this tendency.
Social Media Research Context
So that brings us to what was going on last year in social media. In Australia, there was a lot that happened last year and I can't tell you all of it right now but I'm just going to tell you some of the important things and as Warren said I'll be sending out resources and links I'm trying to work out the best way to get it so that everything that people get is linked all the way back to a citation.
Now before I jump on to last year is I might say that as I was talking about ‘The Dip’ and doing my research with schools I was always reading research as it came out about device use and you might remember seeing this headline back in 2019 "Screen time maybe no worse for kids than eating potatoes" all right so I just want you to pretend that you are a parent many of you probably are parents and you read that what would you think?
So I read that and I'd read the basic paper and I emailed Amy Orben who was one of the authors on this paper because that paper itself was based on three different data sets that they'd drawn on and I said to her- that one of those data sets - it's the early days of Facebook do you remember in the early days of Facebook - how people use Facebook they were mostly putting out stories of their holidays, their lives and connecting with family and friends in the early days of Facebook.
Now in one of those data sets they actually said to the participants ‘when you describe your screen time- leave out time spent talking to friends and family online right so they've actually asked them when they rate their screen time recordings to leave that out this time. That's one of the data sets that's used in this study to say "hey there's no relationship - there's hardly any relationship here between screen use right and mental health’
So basically because of my own research, where we started by asking how much time are you on these different social media apps and we've broken them up and we said - once a day, twice a day, three times a day, five times a day - and within a year already we had to make it up to ‘constantly’ because of the pace in which technology and social media kind of evolved. I know as a researcher myself how messy and unreliable my data is.
So I've always questioned it and I've kind of kept records and I always email the researchers if I'm not sure about what they're saying in their studies.
So we come to what happened last year. So last year Australia did quite a few things on this and one of the measures they took was they announced that a Joint Select Committee for Social Media and Australian society - and members from both houses of parliament sat on that committee and people were invited from all over Australia & organisations were invited to submit their opinions and their research and their data to that joint select committee.
So I sent mine in an opinion based on anxiety and social media use and my concerns about mental health for under 16s. I also sent a second one with other clinical psychologists, colleagues of mine. It was kept confidential - we asked for it to stay confidential. And then I thought well I still don't know the answer I'm just going to read what everyone else has sent in have a look see what they say.
And so what I found was that there were several arguments being used. So I'm reading through these submissions - I'm looking in the media headlines- I am looking now on social media as well to understand what's being said by a range of different people. Broadly there's three types of arguments that were being pushed
The first was that we couldn't possibly put any regulation on social media for mental health reasons.
The second was there's actually a lack of scientific consensus therefore we shouldn't be putting any regulation on.
And the third, is children have rights and there's been quite a bit about that as well. That's just my way of breaking it up for you for today.
Now I know though, as a Clinical Psychologist and this is where I put my clinical psychologist perspective on - I know what clients are telling me - and I also know what the theoretical underpinnings are for anxiety okay that is likely to mean that the way I use my phone or social support or my photos is going to contribute to the anxiety disorder or the depression right I know that from theoretical things. I know from what Paul Salkovskis told me many many years ago that if I have a Xanax (a diazepam) in my pocket when I go catch the train and I'm trying to overcome panic attacks or get over agoraphobia that I will be less likely to get better because of my tablet in my pocket - because I think I managed it because I've got my tablet in my pocket not because I got the train and I survived the panic attack - does that make sense?
So here are just some of the mechanisms - I'm not going to go through them all but in my head I'm thinking and I'm seeing in my clinic all these things coming forward okay these are all the different concerns we've got about unregulated social media use and the mechanisms by which they're causing problems.
Community Impact Evidence
Now I'm going to just race through this this is just my collection of what different people had said in their submissions basically showing that this is a huge problem
The eating disorders obviously only shows us that there's a problem, this increase is just what we're seeing in the community at the same time [period as we have concerns].
So as part of this I'm reading through these submissions and one important one matches with what I'm learning at schools. I want you to think about when a child's in year seven or year eight, so before they're 16 - they are going into secondary school they are still needing to make friends they're having trouble they're worried about fitting in. It's normal for friendships to change. They don't necessarily have good strong social groups - they very quickly get jealous of one another, upset that one friend might go to another friend. They are very easily mean to each other in just subtle ways in a group, just in a group chat even forget all the algorithms.
And you hear stories - I hear stories where a child is being bullied quite badly in this way and then they leave to go to another school - and those children that were being mean at the first school have sent messages ahead to the next school saying "watch out for Jennifer she's not that nice." All right so we've actually got an issue that's not just for the individual in terms of their use of social media we've got an issue with their instant way of transmitting themselves to a whole group we've got an issue coming for how it's actually affecting the community at a school okay the community in a minority group or in a small group like a regional population.
When you hear the stories of suicide which I was really upset by - was to hear that some of the stories like one of the girls that suicided last year or actually I don't remember what year she suicided in, but she was being bullied in Goulburn and the thing was that whatever had started even if it was the small error that she had made or even if it wasn't that had been made up about her basically there was no one in Goulburn that was then willing to be her friend right because the whole community is then poisoned against it not only is she getting nasty messages that are fit with the cyber bullying but there aren't other places for her to break out to make another real life friend.
Now what I read in this this is the Association of Heads of Independent Schools of Australia submission to the joint select committee was that cyber bullying generally happens between first of all students who know each other [Error the preceding fact is from the e-safety commissioner report] It's not strangers. Second of all, for the eSafety Commission we saw that there had been a 313% increase over four years in cyber bullying. Thirdly the teachers and in this submission [this was from the AHISA submission] they were saying that schools are finding that most issues of bullying and harassment had an element of cyber bullying in it and that the teachers had to deal with it during the school day even though it was happening at night.
And principals are telling me that the girls are no longer able to resolve conflicts on their own. Teachers are having to get involved all the time so it's costing the staff. It's actually costing teacher resources. There was a paper that came out a couple of weeks ago suggesting cyber bullying and exclusion etc i.e. the exclusion part of cyber bullying might be having a bit of PTSD similar type similar symptoms.
So the situation is looking really messy for under 16s in terms of how social media is actually effecting their communities and you can see at one school found that even though only 16% of the year were 13 98% had social media at the beginning of year 7.
Examining Mental Health Claims
So I was on an expert round table for the age assurance committee and I had been reading through these submissions and I'm just going to stick with this mental health one [line of arguments from earlier argument slide] to start off with because I think suicide is a very important one when I saw the word suicide I thought oh my goodness if there's going to be more suicide that obviously means we can't do anything about social media you would not want to cut or put regulation on some sort of mechanism that prevents suicide right - that's very emotional that's very persuasive.
So I was on this age assurance round table and I said I can't work it out because I've seen this statement that's sitting in many of the submissions to the government from the mental health organisations and when I trace it back to the data (because I'm always going back to the data) what did they ask? what did they find? can they conclude what they say they found right?
So I said “I can't work this out because it says more people died and I don't know how they measured that they were dead because they're asking questions that they had to complete a survey first off but as you can see here here's the statement in the report - A 2022 survey of 7,000 teenagers by the US Center for Disease Control found that teens who are online regularly are more likely to be depressed" okay well that's a problem right first off but let's ignore that because then it says "but 41% less likely to die by suicide" it says that so they've died according to this - 41% less likely to die and 62% likely to have a serious self harm episode okay than people who are depressed but who are spending less time online or more time online I think it should say.
So anyway on that age assurance round table was one of the people from one of those centers and she said "oh Dr Einstein." yep that sounds like a bit fishy- it's a bit of a problem I'll take it back to our data scientists and I'll get back to you in you know we'll have a look we'll check it out because our name was on that - and she came back a couple of weeks later and actually said "you're right there's an error it was a secondary source." okay now we will let the government know- okay all right great!
But what I want to show you is what that data was, so first of all the first point of this data that has that statement in it is that it was collected between January and June 2021 in America with over 15 year olds who were at that point we were in the middle of COVID school was partial or virtually online right we've got over 15 year olds and now the kicker to this is that when they replicated this data they found that those percentages ignore the death bit and let's just say that was probably them trying to say more likely to have a serious suicide attempt but I'll show you the actual data:
Here is the data okay so if we go back right and look at this this is a [relative risk table -slight error corrected from describing it as a probabilities table] of the kids who are depressed this adds up to 100% this adds up to 100%; and so does that so the argument is that these people that 9.7% here is 65% more likely than this one they've used the cut off as one hour or more on screen to say that if you were using less than one hour on a screen and this is outside of the school day right; that then you're more likely to have an injurious self harm episode.
So my conclusion to this is first of all during COVID if you're an over 15 year old teenager and you were not spending any time watching Netflix, talking with any friends or family [online] you were very isolated at that point in time (right) I do not believe that is an argument that you can use to say that 1 hour is nowhere near the threshold that we're talking about is it? to say I need to be online regularly to stop me from having a serious suicide attempt which is what was said - and which is beneath a lot of those mental health organisations’ arguments when they talk about there being benefits for mental health.
So I wrote to that Joint Committee and said ‘look I just want to double check you got this information’ I couldn't actually speak to anyone, but guess what - that line is still sitting in the final report - it's still there - it hasn't been removed, so people from around the world are seeing this [and it’s incorrect].
Examining Loneliness Claims
So let's go back and have another look at the arguments here I won't be able to go to absolutely everything but I have got responses for everything that I can explain and I'll let you ask me some questions at the end so we've gone to there I think I'm going to go sort of and jump on the loneliness one next because I think that's a really strong one for many of us because intuitively it makes sense that you would want to be less alone.
So this is one of the lines "Social media can provide an alternative for social connection and a safe haven from the difficulties of everyday life" okay keep in mind we've just talked about how so many of the current difficulties of everyday life for kids at school are coming through social media and would not be there if we didn't have it and if you look at what happened when we brought phone bans in if anyone's any question about that to schools if you look carefully at the studies there's a study in Norway that's come out showing that there's less need for psychological care once the phone bans came in we're also seeing less bullying and we're seeing benefits academic benefits for socioeconomically disadvantaged girls
So it's actually the kids who are disadvantaged who are benefiting the most when you get rid of phones in schools.
So I think this is interesting because when you think about well what's the relationship between network size and now I'm jumping to internet use disorder which is when you are qualifying as this is definitely an addictive type of real overuse of the internet and what you see is there are negative correlations so it's true you have less internet use disorder if you have a bigger network size online but it only explains 2% of the varia[nce]
But here's the one that's the most confusing because this one says you have good social support you have less internet use disorder so that's been used as an argument to say look we can get more better social support online but when you look hard at this right that explains 11% of the variability but when you look hard at it good social support is using measures that ask people would your friends deliver you medicine at home if you're sick - that's not online social support that's meaning that there is an element of physical real connection and a lot of those questions are about real connection and authenticity of connection it's not requiring [the person] to be online.
So now I had another look at one of those organisations and what they were saying about how it can be used to reduce loneliness and just to summarize very quickly they've used a review of 12 studies they were all published between 2000 and 2014 so again we're looking at the early use of social media - and [keep in mind] at that point I don't think in most of those studies social media wouldn't have even had necessarily comment sections underneath they certainly wouldn't have had the TikTokky kind of movies and as many of those like features and popularity contests that we now see as part of social media.
Now mostly those studies were done on undergraduate students and basically loneliness was mixed in one in that paper there were two which said it reduced loneliness through the early versions of Facebook but that happened when those same students also said they increased their face to face, so they use the Facebook to increase their social connections in real life and when you actually look at the ones where they're just what happened there okay and then when you just look at the ones that were spending a lot of time on the chat rooms they actually felt lonelier than those who were spending less time at all online.
And we've got this problem because for socially anxious adolescents and let's face it social anxiety is a fair component I actually don't know the numbers off the top of my head but what happens is it becomes easier, it's easier to text someone because you don't have to look at their face, you can take your time to create the text message, you can also it's also a little bit less substantive if it doesn't go well with this person I can switch quickly to another person.
So there's all these features where it feels like it's being helpful but it's not really truly building the child's capacity to be uncomfortable when they go to netball and have to talk to someone new on their netball team okay or it's not truly building their capacity to manage uncertainty actually to manage the feelings they get.
So and we've got this big problem because when it comes to social anxiety and addictive what we're seeing is this addictive use of social media.
Understanding Device Addiction
Now I want to flip back and just think for a moment for all of us about whether our phones and our computers actually have an addictive element of it do they pull us in in a kind of addictive way and I made this video back in 2019 - it's for clinicians [parents & educators] to use with clients - you can use it it's freely available but I just want you to watch it to understand a little bit of what I want you to think about with regard to what's going on with dopamine and sorry intermittent reinforcement - partial reinforcement.
[Video plays showing dopamine response]
“Down the bottom of the screen you can see each time Harry's brain releases a spike of the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine like when he eats a delicious snack or when he finally wins those bonus points yeah
Psychologists have found that our dopamine spikes when we get a reward like a funny meme from your friend and that when we have learned to expect a reward we get that feel good feeling when the signal for the reward comes instead of the reward itself like when you get a notification
But if we expect a reward and it doesn't come we end up with a dip in our dopamine levels leaving us less happy than we were when we started”
—-(end of clip)
Okay so when I made that video the aim was to kind of show how when you get the dip right we should switch off notifications - because you'll be less likely to be interrupted and because just the notification would create that dopamine drive - that drive - the little bit of hope - what's on my phone? what's sitting there - maybe it's a message from that colleague who's been difficult this week? or maybe and maybe or maybe I've solved the problem? okay or maybe it's something nice waiting for me from one of my friends - maybe on social media or on my phone is an email or something that's going to give me a lift make me feel good? okay
So when I made that in 2019 I was just thinking about notifications but I've realized now it's just the sight of your phone it's just the sight of your computer that will draw you into thinking "oh what might be there maybe there's something good waiting for me?" right and that if you do not have good device discipline yourself you will be drawn over to pick it up and just start to look on your emails to start to see and then all of a sudden your email is sort of you get dragged in even if you were supposed to be cooking dinner okay or doing something else.
So the point that I'm trying to make here is I think it's time as a community that we recognise that this partial reinforcement has led to our computers our phones having an addictive pull which just means that we need to be sensible about it and have them out of our sight right - just don't have it on you all the time if you want to be with your family- have it in another room - don't be pulled in and we can't do that if we won't if we don't first acknowledge that addictive pull.
So I think there's an element that it's really important for us as a community and as researchers to say hey I don't have to call it addiction - it's not a diagnosis of addiction it's just recognising this partial reinforcement and the fact that it is now pulling us in all the time right - That's a first step.
Community Examples and Research
Now just thinking about what Jean Twenge did many years ago oh actually now I just wanted to show you what else is going on in the community .so Warren and I are doing some work now with Alex Lykos & I helped make this movie it's a documentary ‘Disconnect Me’ and Alex has let me sort of show a little bit of it in this when I give workshops so I just want you to watch a tiny bit….
[Video excerpt from documentary - Disconnect Me by Alex Lykos & team]
"2 months old yeah he's only two but he knows what an iPad is he knows what a phone is he knows where it is he's drawn to it like all kids are you know as a mom you know you're sort of juggling so many different things and it's just so easy to give the child a phone to sort of go on and it distracts them for a little bit and you get time to have your coffee"
"What's your favorite thing to do when you're on a smartphone?"
"My favorite thing to do is watch Netflix we're watching YouTube”
“I watch YouTube”
“What's the longest amount of time you'll watch Netflix on a smartphone 5 hours”
“We watch YouTube videos and clips on cars and ABC learning and stuff like that just to get his attention just to get him to eat to make sure that he's focusing on something where you can just shovel food in his mouth”.
“The only time I ever used a video while we're at a cafe is if he's screaming or crying getting bored"
I don't know if anyone saw that research that came out a year or two ago showing that when parents say that they are using media to calm down a tantrum at the age of 3 and a half; at 4 and a half those children are having more issues with anger and frustration and they're less able to put in effortful control - so less able to manage themselves then when they're going to need to go to school and sit in a classroom quietly.
we've seen in the ADHD area different sort of sparklings of studies coming out there was one from Taiwan that showed that the mother's use of her screen when the child is three is associated with increased incidence of ADHD when the child is eight. So mother's use - not child's use.
So something's going on which yes it's going to take us more time to find out about - I'm running a panel with Professor Wayne Warburton and Mic Moshel, one of his PhD students and Professor Mark Williams on neuroscience and the effects of addictive online gaming, social media and phone use in a couple of weeks it's just a 1-hour expert panel - insights to bring people up to speed on what are the effects of this on brain development and on cognitive capacity.
Because their concerns which were written also in another one of the submissions I read to the government are about what we are seeing now in terms of brain development. One of the issues they talk about so one of their studies showed this compounding impact of use on executive functioning the ability to plan, to think ahead. We all know it's having a bit of an effect on our attention and that's where this device discipline is so important that we actually acknowledge and recognise it. One of their concerns is also interhemispheric connectivity and they're sort of talking a bit about maybe - probably not but maybe - early onset dementia being seen when it's been but they're worried okay - so they want us to look and actually acknowledge as psychologists and researchers what might be going on and not be in denial about this.
And I just think as far as I'm concerned as a Clinical Psychologist I was brought up as a scientist practitioner which means that you read the articles, you think as a scientist, you read the theory, you think as a theorist - then you look at the evidence. Then you try things out, then you evaluate it and the cycle keeps going you don't just stop. You've got to keep going - you've got to keep questioning.
So I want psychologists and researchers to be paying attention to what is going on when it comes to the actual underlying evidence that we are building.
Key Research Findings
And Jean Twenge what she actually showed in one of her early studies was this - This is the three groups right, 11 to 13 year olds is the dash line; 6 to 10 is the straight line; 14 to 17 year olds is the heavier line and what she found when she asked caregivers with Dr Campbell was that children the more screen time the are on the less likely they are to be able to calm themselves down, to be able to finish a task, to be curious about the world like ‘actual curiosity’ and the more arguments they had i.e. the more difficult they were for caregivers.
From Twenge, J. M., & Campbell, W. K. (2018). Associations between screen time and lower psychological well-being among children and adolescents: Evidence from a population-based study. Preventive medicine reports, 12, 271-283.
So we're kind of getting this picture where if you just ignore screen time altogether it is causing problems in child development and in children's ability to kind of manage themselves
So let's look actually at the detail okay and I popped up that cherry because I know people talk about cherry picking research but I think what's really important is whatever research we use, especially when there aren't yet meta analyses out there, is that we just look very carefully at every piece of research and what I've seen when I've read through these arguments is that very often people will be citing a piece of research that is their own research. Research which is relying on one question about screen use measured during COVID - or someone's opinion about their screen use - there's no looking at the mechanisms at what might be going on - usually in the actual denial of what might be going on…
So yes I am cherry picking some of this research [for studies with a robust method] but like I said I'm putting it all out there for other people to double check I want everyone to have this information all the way to the source studies.
So we're seeing self-disclosure on social media is gratifying it gives you a pick me up it's like that dopamine hit and that's not surprising just think if you're a child and you're wanting to make friends and you don't know if people are going to like you or not it feels really good to tell someone something personal. Of course it does - no wonder it's hard to go to sleep at night when you're doing that.
Minority Groups and Trauma Processing
And all right I think this is a really important one which is when we think about minority groups because it's another one of those arguments that really pull us in. One thing that we've seen in the studies is one study showing that if you share your story of being victimized online then you're actually at increased risk of anxiety, depression or substance use.
Now I think the reason for that comes back to Perceptual Control Theory and also to treatment -what we know about PTSD treatment so if you've had a very very bad experience what we do is usually sort of more prolonged exposure, which is where you are talking through what happened to you with someone who knows you and who lets you talk about it sort of from beginning to end. You really unpack it, as you unpack it you start to see what your thoughts are you start to realise [things]. The other person might help you realise, it wasn't your fault - you start to correct any cognitive errors and then you might do it again with a different person separately, again. It's quite long - it's not like a short chat as you're unpacking it. You might go back and do it again with the first person. It might be that person is a therapist. It might not be that the person is a therapist, but the point is you're doing it properly and that person knows you and they help you think about what's going on.
Whereas if you just put it on social media what happens is you get people feeling their own victimisation - so they feel it the pain lasts longer. it's a short[cut] - they're trying to get empathy quickly right but they're also getting what we're seeing is they're almost being traumatized again or they're saying that this is going on again because they feel the pain of other people's trauma and they are not doing that nice proper unpacking that. We need to do [this] to get to the other side of something bad happening to us okay so I think that's part of what's happening I'll speed through this little bit there's other stuff about LGBTQI communities but I'll skip through that I've talked about that I've kind of talked about that I'll try and finish on just this.
This is one of Amy Orben's other studies which I think is really interesting because one of the findings that we have and this was with a massive population it is cross-sectional data but she's got another section in it that's longitudinal as well - what it shows is that for girls there's no benefit of social media at all until they're 16 they don't feel better in their life they don't feel better in their satisfaction with their schoolwork and they don't feel better in their appearance their satisfaction with appearance until they're 16.
And that is part of the reason why I was like okay well maybe we should think about 16, maybe they have some more maturity by then. Maybe they're more they've got a bit more of a sense that some people like them, that they can survive, they've had more chance to build their face to face skills but we don't have great information about whether 16 is the right age maybe it should be 18 - certainly for me this is about development. I don't feel like I can dictate to any adults what adults should do with their lives or how they should use technology, but I do feel like it's my job as a clinical psychologist to make sure that when it comes to child development - that the child has a right to development and when you come to the rights argument - that their right to healthy development should trump all other rights. I think certainly emotional development, social development, and brain development [Should be prioritised]
So I'll stop there like I said there'll be more like I've got a longer talk thank you.
Q&A Session
I'll just throw the floor open to questions now do you want to share any questions sure any questions
Question 1 - Multi-layered Approach: Yeah nice to see you thanks for coming out to visit us what's the end game what are you thinking multi-layered approach
Dr. Einstein's Response: I didn't get to that slide but I think we need public health as part of this Regulation is actually about putting the fines onto social media platforms and I think countries around the world (if they come on board) will help us think through how to do that even more effectively than we've come at it, so I think social media platforms have to have skin in the game They should not just be permitted not to have any responsibility.
Then I think we need to change the norms by educating parents. I think we need to educate doctors there's too many times that I see doctors and psychologists and have clients coming in to see me, where they've been to see another psychologist and no one has asked them about their device use I don't think you can effectively treat anxiety or depression whilst there's 7 hours of device use going at the same time. Kids are missing school. They are on their devices at home, they are not bored. They are not learning that they are okay if they go to school and that they survived it - They are actually sort of drowning their worries and not learning how to get over problems.
So I don't think doctors should have to see exactly how they are using their device but I think absolute screen time should be part of mental health- if a child's got a problem and it should be part of the conversation. It should be included in a mental health care plan and there should be a discussion between the GP and the doctor and the psychologist to know that it's at least being discussed because basically I think if you get the education right, no one wants these problems. No one wants anxiety depression - if you give people the right information they will then make their own changes.
So this is not about telling parents that they should enforce social media I think we've got to find the right way to work with parents if kids are already on social media but I'm hoping that if we get the right information out there - that more parents will delay getting smartphones for their kids and you'll get a cohort - you might get 60% of kids at schools where the parents have actually made it much harder for the kids because they actually don't even own the right sort of device. Maybe tech companies will bring in better phones and different sorts of solutions.
But need changes on many levels it would be great if Google and Microsoft could also give parents and schools information about amount of time on devices -across devices that's also a problem. It's a massive gap for parents.
Question 2 - What Children Are Missing: Yeah just a thought sorry I'm interested also in what kids are not doing because they're spending the time on devices and I think well a couple of things that all going through fabulous talk thank you going through this in terms of what we're now seeing in universities so those kids grow up and they're now our students and we're seeing exactly the issues that you're talking about but now in the student body yeah but the things that they were not doing with their time is reading and our students aren't reading doing things slowly and catching up with people face to face playing sports being out there getting dirty that stuff is no longer happening so I think it's as much a damage that you're talking about there in terms of the control the self-regulation and the executive functioning all that kind of stuff but they're also not doing the things that builds resilience that builds an ability to manage uncertainty and builds self-regulation physical development physical health so yeah if there if rather than only thinking about you know what's the problems doing what are they not doing
Dr. Einstein's Response: When I talk with parents about what's going on that's sort of more the style. This is a very research-oriented talk for you - to understand what's going on because I think the issue I'm wanting to convey to people - and like Warren said at the beginning overseas they were saying there was no psychologist and no researcher here that was supportive of this and I think the reason they're saying that [about my work] is because well - I don't quite understand it myself because I cannot understand why anyone would not want social media platforms to have a bit of skin in the game and why we would want misinformation to be out there.
But even a couple of weeks ago I saw an article in The Conversation which has all these reasons about why it won't work and I just think we need to be coming together as researchers, government, educators, psychologists, doctors -everyone needs to put their head together. We need to agree on what the problems are and not be fighting about what the right solution is because we can't have the right solution because we haven't tried anything yet. You can't have an evidence base when you haven't done anything to build the evidence base.
Question 3 - Parental Shame and Resistance: So yeah that was such an amazing talk so thank you for that and just following on from that I think yeah very much in the thick of this conversation and one of the things my friend mentioned which I thought was a really great counterpoint to why because you think it's just so logical right why wouldn't you want things like school bans and it makes so much sense but her thought was that people who like have kind of let the bull out of the gate early right because it is easy pocket your kid on a phone it'll calm things down like and then easy to just kind of let that go on it's almost those people and the shame that then makes them kind of double down on but it's fine right like I done the wrong thing I haven't messed up my kid so I'm kind of curious about your thoughts on and hopefully maybe you mentioned you sent some stuff out but I'd love to have some resources like available for schools for other parents like in those conversations around like how do you provide those really clear points
Closing Remarks
Professor Warren Mansell - Brilliant well thank you again Dani for all this incredibly resourceful information and on behalf of the Enable Institute thank you so much thank you thank you - I can say personally that I'm very grateful that social media didn't exist during my adolescence and young adulthood but also as a parent with two adolescents one who is 16 and one who is younger than 16 this is such a topical thing and you know going through my head as I know I think it affects many of us here and we all want to do the right thing and we need better evidence so thank you for sharing the current state of evidence with us. It seems like there's so much more work that needs to be done in this area that potentially we can all contribute to so thank you so much.
Role in the social media minimum age legislation (2024)
Senate Committee Evidence video:
Approximately 50 minutes plus Q&A
