The excessive use of social networks by the youngest is increasingly feared. Violent content, insults, harassment… The moderation of these platforms, often limited when it is not non-existent, is not enough to reassure parents. No more than the operation of algorithms which aim to capture as much “available brain time” as possible, to the detriment of studies or other activities. And faced with the distress of some anxious, depressive or suicidal children, the questions multiply. Séverine Erhel, lecturer in cognitive psychology at Rennes 2, finds them legitimate, but nevertheless suggests putting certain accusations into perspective.
The Express: A recent survey carried out by Ifop shows an unprecedented distrust of young people towards science, and in particular among those who use social networks intensively. Some researchers criticize its methodology and denounce a “unnecessarily anxiety-provoking framing”. And you?
Severine Erhel: These surveys are content to show a correlation without proving causality. But is it because young people use social networks too much that they lose faith in science – I have a little trouble believing this personally – or because they don’t believe in the science they use social networks more frequently? It’s always the same problem with polls: as there is no scientific approach, we quickly drift towards sensationalism.
Exactly, a scientific study published last January in the journal Jama Pediatrics suggests that adolescents who frequently consult social networks become “hypersensitive to the judgments and reactions of others”. What do you think ?
Here again, the question of causality should be asked. The authors indicate that out of 169 recruits, those who go more often on social networks are more sensitive to the reactions of their peers. But do they become more sensitive because they go there frequently or is it because they are more sensitive that they go there more often? The scientific literature leans more towards the second hypothesis. It also shows that these are often adolescents with particular profiles who have an unregulated and excessive use of social networks, which can affect their daily life, lead to intrapsychic conflicts (such as guilt), even interindividual, with family or school.
Is there a composite portrait of these teenagers?
Scientific literature shows that young people who use social networks excessively often have problems with anxiety, depression and self-esteem, such as a negative body image. We are currently trying to measure the associations between these different factors and a bidirectional aspect cannot be ruled out. It is also possible that the more an anxious or depressed individual uses social networks, the more he accentuates his troubles, but researchers have not yet decided this question.
Numerous studies also show that it is possible that adolescents with these profiles have inappropriate stress management strategies: rather than working on the cause of their anxiety or depression, they take refuge in the digital world, for example by seeking positive judgment or by regulating their stress by sharing their experience.
But it should also be remembered that the problematic use of digital technology concerns less than 10% of the population. The same is probably true for social media. These are not particularly bad in absolute terms. Their use is especially harmful for a small part of the population which presents psychological and social economic risk factors. It is on these people that mental health prevention efforts must be focused.
The excessive use of these platforms can also be explained by a factor called “Fomo”. What is it about ?
The “fear of missing out” is summed up in an individual by an increasingly pervasive apprehension that others are living enriching experiences from which he feels excluded. This then translates into a need to stay connected continuously to see what they are doing. Fomo is an individual predisposition that everyone can more or less feel. Social networks play with this social dimension and abuse it to the point of, for some, using “dark patterns” – namely interfaces designed to trap users – which can amplify Fomo.
The works of Aarif Alutaybi, from the Faculty of Science and Technology at the University of Bournemouth (United Kingdom) have described them well. Among them, there is the fact of pushing people to exchange and create groups, availability indicators, notifications, the power to tag other users, or even the limitation of the duration of messages, etc.
Would you say that the use of social networks is harmful to learning?
We have managed a study published in 2020, on the attention of students during their tutorials. Our results show that 73% of them had had multimedia multitasking behaviors (writing or reading messages with their phone) and 60% non-multimedia multitasking (chatting with a neighbour, drawing, etc.). We observed that multimedia multitasking led to much lower course learning performance and that the more students used social networks in class, the lower their performance. This result goes against the myth of digital natives, which consists in believing that the youngest are accustomed to multitasking because they were born with the Internet and smartphones. In reality, they have like everyone else: their cognitive capacity is not unlimited.
Should depressive or suicidal adolescents be weaned from social networks?
This is a bad solution because it takes away a crutch, which is admittedly bad, but which helps them to manage their condition. And like any weaning, this can be particularly violent. We must treat the causes more than the consequences, with support from a health professional who will help reduce interactions on the networks to achieve something more acceptable in daily life.
And for those victims of cyberbullying?
This phenomenon is detrimental to the mental health of individuals and is a real problem. But it is generally the extension of school bullying. We must therefore act at this level, with media education. Ditto for the cyberbullying of women: it seems to me that we must tackle it from school through education on consent and equality between men and women.
Can we really say that algorithms can make you addicted to social networks in the same way as a drug?
I am wary of hasty analogies that create confusion between addiction to substances and addiction to social networks, which is not strictly speaking an addiction, but a problematic use. This type of comparison is false, first on the neurobiological level, because the extent of the modifications and the consequences in our brain are not comparable; then in terms of health, because substances such as alcohol or tobacco can cause cancer, not social networks. Finally, this would amount to considering that the problem comes only from technologies and not from other psychological and socio-economic determinants.
So yes, predatory technologies are a problem, but let’s stop stigmatizing them until they are the bedrock of young people’s mental health problems. Eco-anxiety, fear of unemployment and the rise of extremism will not disappear with the end of social networks. Feeding a deterministic view of technology is conducive to moral panics that we are subject to it and cannot do anything about it. On the contrary, we can regain power at the individual level, by developing our own free will, and at the collective level, with the establishment of media literacy programs for the population, by favoring free and decentralized platforms and with the regulation of platforms by public authorities.
