Specification curve analysis shows that social media use is linked to poor mental health, especially among girls

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The connection between social media use and mental health issues in girls is particularly acute, as shown in this current study. 

An important 2019 paper applied a novel analytic technique called Specification Curve Analysis (SCA) to data from three large-scale samples to investigate the association between adolescent technology use and mental health/well-being. This paper came to the conclusion that there was an association between technology and mental health, but that it was tiny and almost insignificant. 

This 2022 study re-ran SCA on the same datasets while applying alternative constraints, including: 1) examining specific digital media activities (e.g., social media) separately rather than lumping all “screen time” including TV together; 2) examining boys and girls separately; 3) excluding potential mediators from the list of controls; and 4) treating scales equally (rather than allowing one scale with many subscales to dominate all others). The authors were able to reproduce the original results with the original configurations; but when they used the revised constraints, they found that among girls there is a consistent and substantial association between mental health and social media use. 

These associations were stronger than links between mental health and binge drinking, sexual assault, obesity, and hard drug use, suggesting that these associations may have substantial practical significance as many countries are experiencing rising rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide among teenagers and young adults.

Jean M. Twenge, Jonathan Haidt, Jimmy Lozano, Kevin M. Cummins, Specification curve analysis shows that social media use is linked to poor mental health, especially among girls, Acta Psychologica, Volume 224, 2022.