A new study from the University of Washington challenges the prevailing narrative about social media’s impact on teen mental health. While concerns about platforms like Instagram driving a mental health crisis have led to lawsuits and calls for warning labels, researchers found that the dominant emotion teens experience while using the app is boredom.
The study, presented at the ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference in Delft, Netherlands, tracked 25 U.S. teens’ moment-by-moment experiences on Instagram. It revealed a cycle of boredom: teens open the app out of boredom, scroll through mostly uninteresting content, and eventually log off due to boredom.
Sifting Through “Content Soup” for Meaningful Interactions
Lead author Rotem Landesman, a UW doctoral student, explained the motivation behind the study: “A lot of the talk about social media is at the extremes. You either hear about harassment or bullying — which are real phenomena — or this kind of techno-utopian view of things. We really wanted to study the mundane, daily experience of teens using Instagram.”
The research team used a custom app called AppMinder to capture teens’ real-time experiences. Participants received pop-up surveys while using Instagram, asking about their emotional state and reasons behind it.
Co-senior author Alexis Hiniker, a UW associate professor, described the teens’ experience: “We saw teens turning to Instagram in moments of boredom, looking for some kind of stimulation. They were finding enough moments of closeness and connection with their friends on the app to keep them coming back. That value is definitely there, but it’s really buried in gimmicks, attention-grabbing features, content that’s sometimes upsetting or frustrating, and a ton of junk.”
Coping Strategies and Design Recommendations
The study found that teens employed several strategies to improve their Instagram experience:
- Curating their feeds through follows, unfollows, and likes
- Quickly scrolling past or logging off when encountering negative content
- Adjusting app settings to reduce negative emotions
Based on these findings, the researchers proposed design changes:
- Prompts for reflection during app use
- Simplified feed curation features
- Data-driven tracking of user well-being
Co-senior author Katie Davis emphasized the need for change: “Instagram’s push notifications and algorithmically curated feeds forever hold out the promise of teens experiencing a meaningful interaction, while delivering on this promise only intermittently. Unfortunately, it’s much easier to identify the problem than to fix it.”
Why it matters:
This research provides a more nuanced understanding of teens’ social media experiences, challenging the notion that platforms like Instagram are primarily harmful. By highlighting the prevalence of boredom and the strategies teens use to navigate content, the study offers insights that could inform more effective approaches to improving teen well-being online.
The findings suggest that while social media platforms do present challenges for teen mental health, the day-to-day experience is more mundane than often portrayed. This nuanced perspective could help parents, educators, and policymakers develop more targeted interventions and guidelines for healthy social media use among teens.
Looking ahead, the research team plans to further analyze their data with a new group of teens, aiming to gain additional insights and recommendations. As Landesman notes, “It is not and should not be the sole responsibility of teens to make their experiences better, to navigate these algorithms without knowing how they work, exactly. The responsibility also lies with companies running social media platforms.”
As the debate over social media’s impact on teen mental health continues, this study provides valuable empirical data to inform policy decisions and platform design. By focusing on the everyday experiences of teens, rather than extreme cases, researchers and developers may be able to create more effective solutions that balance the benefits of social connection with the need to protect young users’ well-being.