Chapter 6 Why Social Media Harms Girls More Than Boys

Chapter 6

Why Social Media Harms Girls More Than Boys

Alexis Spence was born on Long Island, New York, in 2002. She got her first iPad for Christmas in 2012, when she was 10. Initially she used it for Webkinz—a line of stuffed animals that enables children to play with a virtual version of their animal. But in 2013, while in fifth grade, some kids teased her for playing this childish game and urged her to open an Instagram account.

Her parents were very careful about technology use. They maintained a strict prohibition on screens in bedrooms; Alexis and her brother had to use a shared computer in the living room. They checked Alexis’s iPad regularly, to see what apps she had. They said no to Instagram.

Like many young users, however, Alexis found ways to circumvent those rules. She opened an Instagram account herself by stating that she was 13, even though she was 11. She would download the app, use it for a while, and then delete it so her parents wouldn’t see it. She learned, from other underage Instagram users, how to hide the app on her home screen under a calculator icon, so she no longer had to delete it. When her parents eventually learned that she had an account and began to monitor it and set restrictions, Alexis made secondary accounts where she could post without their knowledge.

At first, Alexis was elated by Instagram. In November 2013, she wrote in her journal, “On Instagram I reach 127 followers. Ya! Let’s put it this way, if I was happy and excited for 10 followers then this is just AMAZING!!!!” But over the next few months her mental health plunged, and she began to show signs of depression. Five months after she opened her first Instagram account, she drew the picture in Figure 6.1.

Within six months of opening her account, the content Instagram’s algorithms chose for Alexis had morphed from her initial interest in fitness to a stream of photos of models to dieting advice and then to pro-anorexia content. In eighth grade, she was hospitalized for anorexia and depression. She battled eating disorders and depression for the rest of her teen years.

Figure 6.1. Drawing made by Alexis Spence in April 2015, age 12. The words on her laptop are “worthless, die, ugly, stupid, kill yourself.” The words on her phone are “stupid, ugly, fat.” Copied from the court filing in Spence v. Meta . [1]

Alexis is now 21. She has regained control of her life and works as an emergency medical technician, though she still struggles with eating disorders. I spoke with Alexis and her mother after reading the lawsuit her parents filed against Meta for the dangerous product it offered to their daughter, without their permission. I learned more about the dark years when Alexis was in and out of hospitals and about her parents’ struggle to keep her away from social media. During one period of separation from social media, Alexis punched a hole in a wall, out of anger. But after a longer hospital stay with no social media, her mother says, Alexis returned to her old sweet self. “She was a different person. She was kind; she was polite. It happened to be during Mother’s Day, and she made me the most beautiful Mother’s Day card. We had our daughter back.”

Why does social media have such a magnetic pull on girls? How, exactly, does it suck them in and then harm many of them, causing depression, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and suicidal thoughts? [2]

As we’ve seen, the move from basic phones to smartphones in the early 2010s brought a large increase in the variety and intensity of digital activities, as well as related increases in the four foundational harms: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. Around 2013, psychiatric wards in the United States and other Anglo countries began to fill disproportionately with girls. [3] In this chapter, I’ll explore the reasons why social media has harmed girls more than boys. In the next chapter, on boys, I’ll talk about their different technology use, and I’ll show that the hit to their well-being is seen less in their rates of mental illness (which did increase) and more in their declining success and increasing disengagement from the real world. In both chapters, I’ll focus on data from the United States and the U.K. because it is so plentiful. [4]

The Evidence That Social Media Harms Girls

Social media platforms, as I defined them in the previous chapter, serve the function of sharing user-generated content widely and asynchronously. On the most prototypical platforms, like Instagram, users post content—often about themselves—and then wait for the judgments and comments of others. Such posting and waiting, along with social comparison, is having larger and more harmful effects on girls and young women than on boys and young men, and this difference shows up consistently in many correlational studies. These studies typically ask teens about their technology use, and also about their mental health, and then look to see whether those who use more of a certain technology end up with worse mental health.

I should note that some studies have failed to find evidence of harm. One well-known study reported that the association of digital media use with harmful psychological outcomes was so close to zero that it was roughly the same size as the association of “eating potatoes” with such harms. [5] But when Jean Twenge and I reanalyzed the same data sets and zoomed in on the association of social media (as opposed to a broader measure of digital technology use that included watching TV and owning a computer) with poor mental health for girls (instead of all teens merged together), we found much larger correlations. [6] The proper comparison was no longer eating potatoes but instead binge drinking or using marijuana. There is a clear, consistent, and sizable link [7] between heavy social media use and mental illness for girls, [8] but that relationship gets buried or minimized in studies and literature reviews that look at all digital activities for all teens. [9] Journalists who report that the evidence of harm is weak are usually referring to such studies. [10]

You can see this sizable link in figure 6.2, which reports data from the Millennium Cohort Study, a British study that followed roughly 19,000 children born around the year 2000 as they matured through adolescence. The figure shows the percentage of U.K. teens who could be considered depressed (based on their responses to a 13-item depression scale), as a function of how many hours they reported spending on social media on a typical weekday. For boys, knowing how much time they spend on social media doesn’t tell you much, unless they say that they are heavy users. It’s only when boys are spending more than two hours a day that the curve begins to rise.

Depression by Level of Social Media Use, U.K.

Figure 6.2. Percent of U.K. teens depressed as a function of hours per weekday on social media. Teens who are heavy users of social media are more depressed than light users and nonusers, and this is especially true for girls. (Source: Millennium Cohort Study.) [11]

For girls, there is a larger and more consistent relationship. The more time a girl spends on social media, the more likely she is to be depressed. Girls who say that they spend five or more hours each weekday on social media are three times as likely to be depressed as those who report no social media time.

Is Social Media a Cause or Just a Correlate?

Correlational studies are always open to multiple interpretations. There could be “reverse correlation,” in which depression drives girls to use social media, rather than the other way around. [12] There could be a third variable, such as genetics, or overly permissive parenting, or loneliness, that causes both. To establish that one thing caused another to happen, the main tool scientists use is an experiment in which some people are randomly assigned to receive a treatment and other people are randomly assigned to be in the control group, which receives a placebo (in medical studies) or carries on with business as usual (in many social science experiments). Experiments like this are sometimes referred to as RCTs (randomized controlled trials). In some social media experiments, the treatment is to require young adults to go for a few days or weeks with reduced or no social media access. In other experiments, the treatment is to bring young adults (usually college students) into the lab and put them in situations that model some aspect of being on social media (such as swiping through photos) and then see how these treatments affect psychological variables.

For example, one study randomly assigned college students to greatly reduce the use of social media platforms (or not reduce, for the control group) and then measured their depressive symptoms three weeks later. The authors reported that “the limited use group showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression over three weeks compared to the control group.” [13] Another study randomly assigned teen girls to be exposed to selfies taken from Instagram, either in their original state or after modification by the experimenters to be extra attractive. “Results showed that exposure to manipulated Instagram photos directly led to lower body image.” [14] Taken as a whole, the dozens of experiments that Jean Twenge, Zach Rausch, and I have collected [15] confirm and extend the patterns found in the correlational studies: Social media use is a cause of anxiety, depression, and other ailments, not just a correlate .

Does Social Media Affect Groups as Well as Individuals?

There is a major limitation to all of these experiments: They look for effects of social media on individuals in isolation , as if we were studying the health effects of consuming sugar. If 100 teens are randomly assigned to reduce their sugar intake for three months, will they experience any health benefits, compared with a control group? But social media is not like sugar. It doesn’t just affect the person who consumes it. When it was carried into schools in the early 2010s, on smartphones in students’ pockets, it quickly changed the culture for everyone. (Communication networks rapidly become more powerful as they grow. [16] ) Students talked to each other less between classes, at recess, and at lunch, because they began to spend much of that time checking their phones, often getting caught up in microdramas throughout the day. [17] This meant that they made eye contact less frequently, laughed together less, and lost practice making conversation. Social media therefore harmed the social lives even of students who stayed away from it.

These group-level effects may be much larger than the individual-level effects, and they are likely to suppress the true size of the individual-level effects. [18] If an experimenter assigns some adolescents to abstain from social media for a month while all of their friends are still on it, then the abstainers are going to be more socially isolated for that month. Yet even still, in several studies, getting off social media improves their mental health. So just imagine how much bigger the effect would be if all of the students in 20 middle schools could be randomly assigned to give up social media for a year, or (more realistically) to put their phones in a phone locker each morning, while 20 other middle schools served as the control group. These are the kinds of experiments we most need in order to examine group-level effects.

There is one small but important class of experiments that does measure group-level effects by asking, how does a whole community change when social media suddenly becomes much more available in that community? [19] For example, one study took advantage of the fact that Facebook was originally offered only to students at a small number of colleges. As the company expanded to new colleges, did mental health change in the following year or two at those institutions, compared with colleges where students did not yet have access to Facebook? Yes, it got worse, with bigger effects on women. The authors found that

the roll-out of Facebook at a college increased symptoms of poor mental health, especially depression, and led to increased utilization of mental healthcare services. We also find that, according to the students’ reports, the decline in mental health translated into worse academic performance. Additional evidence on mechanisms suggests the results are due to Facebook fostering unfavorable social comparisons. [20]

I have found five studies that looked at the rollout of high-speed internet around the world, and all five found evidence of damage to mental health. It’s hard to have a phone-based childhood when data speeds are low. For example, what happened in Spain as fiber-optic cables were laid and high-speed internet came to different regions at different times? A 2022 study analyzed “the effect of access to high-speed Internet on hospital discharge diagnoses of behavioral and mental health cases among adolescents.” The conclusion:

We find a positive and significant impact on girls but not on boys. Exploring the mechanism behind these effects, we show that [the arrival of high-speed internet] increases addictive Internet use and significantly decreases time spent sleeping, doing homework, and socializing with family and friends. Girls again power all these effects. [21]

These studies, and many more, [22] indicate that the rapid movement of adolescent social life onto social media platforms was a cause , not just a correlate, of the increase in depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and other mental health problems that began in the early 2010s. [23] When some researchers say that the correlations or effect sizes are too small to explain such large increases, they are referring to studies that measured only individual-level effects . They rarely consider the rapid transformation of group dynamics that I am calling the Great Rewiring of Childhood.

But why does social media hurt girls more than boys, specifically? How does it affect their developing brains and identities?

Girls Use Social Media More Than Boys

In the early 2010s, thanks to smartphones, boys and girls started spending more time online, but they spent their time differently. Boys gravitated to watching YouTube videos, to using text-based platforms such as Reddit, and especially to playing online multiplayer video games. Girls became much heavier users of the new visually oriented platforms, primarily Instagram, followed by Snapchat, Pinterest, and Tumblr. [24]

A 2017 study in the U.K. asked teens to rate the effects of the most popular social media platforms on different parts of their well-being, including anxiety, loneliness, body image, and sleep. Teens rated Instagram as the worst of the five apps, followed by Snapchat. YouTube was the only platform that received a positive overall score. [25]

The visually oriented platforms all used the business model developed by Facebook: Maximize time spent on the platform in order to maximize the extraction of data and the value of the user to advertisers. Figure 6.3 shows the percentage of American high school students who spent more than 40 hours a week using social media platforms. That’s like working a full-time job while also being a full-time student. By 2015, one in seven American girls had reached this astronomical level. The survey question was only added in 2013. If we had the data going back to 2010, when few teens had smartphones, the numbers would likely have been close to zero. It was almost impossible for teens to spend 40 hours a week on social media before they could carry the internet with them in their pockets. [26]

Girls spend more time on social media platforms, [27] and the platforms they are on are the worst for mental health. So even if girls and boys were identical psychologically, we would expect to find larger increases in anxiety and depression among girls.

Social Media Super-Users (40+ Hours per Week)

Figure 6.3. Percent of U.S. students (8th, 10th, and 12th grade) who reported spending 40 or more hours a week on social media. (Source: Monitoring the Future.) [28]

But girls and boys are not identical psychologically. There are a number of reasons why girls’ core developmental needs are more easily exploited and subverted by social media than is the case for boys (whose needs are more easily exploited by video game companies).

Agency and Communion

Girls and boys are similar psychologically in most ways; an introductory psychology textbook needs only occasional notes about gender differences. But there are a few gender differences that show up widely across cultures and eras. One that is useful for understanding media effects is the distinction between agency and communion, which refer to two sets of motivations or goals found in nearly everyone. One recent review defined them in this way:

Agency arises from striving to individuate and expand the self and involves qualities such as efficiency, competence, and assertiveness. Communion arises from striving to integrate the self in a larger social unit through caring for others and involves qualities such as benevolence, cooperativeness, and empathy. [29]

The two motives are woven together in changing patterns across the life course, and that weaving is particularly important for adolescents who are developing their identities. Part of defining the self comes from successfully integrating into groups; part of being attractive to groups is demonstrating one’s value as an individual with unique skills. [30]

Researchers have long found that boys and men are more focused on agency strivings while girls and women are more focused on communion strivings. [31] The fact that these gender differences have decreased over time tells us that they result in part from cultural factors and forces. The fact that they emerge early in children’s play [32] and can be found in the gendered play patterns of other primates [33] tells us that there is probably a biological contribution as well. For our purposes in this book it doesn’t matter where the difference comes from. What matters is that tech companies know about these differences and use them to hook their core audience. Social media offers new and easy ways to “connect.” Social media seems to satisfy communion needs, but in many ways it frustrates them.

Four Reasons Why Girls Are Particularly Vulnerable

There are at least four ways that social media companies exploit girls’ greater need for communion and their other social concerns. I believe these pathways, viewed together, explain why girls’ mental health collapsed so quickly, in so many countries, as soon as they got smartphones and moved their social lives onto Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, and other “sharing” platforms.

Reason #1: Girls Are More Affected by Visual Social Comparison and Perfectionism

The 2021 song “Jealousy, Jealousy” by Olivia Rodrigo sums up what it’s like for many girls to scroll through social media today. The song begins,

I kinda wanna throw my phone across the room

’Cause all I see are girls too good to be true.

Rodrigo then says that “co-comparison” with the perfect bodies and paper-white teeth of girls she doesn’t know is slowly killing her. It’s a powerful song; I hope you’ll listen to it. [34]

Psychologists have long studied social comparison and its pervasive effects. The social psychologist Susan Fiske says that humans are “comparison machines.” [35] Mark Leary, another social psychologist, describes the machinery in more detail: It’s as if we all have a “sociometer” in our brains—a gauge that runs from 0 to 100, telling us where we stand in the local prestige rankings, moment by moment. When the needle drops, it triggers an alarm—anxiety—that motivates us to change our behavior and get the needle back up. [36]

Teens are particularly vulnerable to insecurity because their bodies and their social lives are changing so rapidly as they leave childhood. They struggle to figure out where they fit in the new prestige order for their sex. Nearly all adolescents care how they look, especially as they begin to develop romantic interests. All know that they will be chosen or passed over based in part on their appearance. But for adolescent girls, the stakes are higher because a girl’s social standing is usually more closely tied to her beauty and sex appeal than is the case for boys. Compared with boys, when girls go onto social media, they are subjected to more severe and constant judgments about their looks and their bodies, and they’re confronted with beauty standards that are further out of reach.

It was bad enough when I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, when girls were exposed to airbrushed and later photoshopped models. But those were adult strangers; they were not a girl’s competition. So what happened when most girls in a school got Instagram and Snapchat accounts and started posting carefully edited highlight reels of their lives and using filters and editing apps to improve their virtual beauty and online brand? Many girls’ sociometers plunged, because most were now below what appeared to them to be the average. All around the developed world, an anxiety alarm went off in girls’ minds, at approximately the same time.

You can see the power of filters and tuning apps in Figure 6.4, in which Instagram influencer Josephine Livin demonstrates how easy it is to essentially turn a dial and morph oneself into an ever more unrealistic Instagram beauty.

Figure 6.4 . Beauty filters can make you as perfect as you want to be, which then increases the pressure on other girls to improve their beauty. (Source: Josephine Livin, @josephinelivin, on Instagram.) [37]

These tuning apps gave girls the ability to present themselves with perfect skin, fuller lips, bigger eyes, and a narrower waist (in addition to showcasing the most “perfect” parts of their lives). [38] Snapchat offered similar features through its filters, first released in 2015, many of which gave users full lips, petite noses, and doe eyes at the touch of a button.

You can see sociometers plunging in figure 6.5, which shows the percentage of American high school seniors who said they were satisfied or completely satisfied when asked the question “how satisfied are you with yourself?” The plunge happened for boys too, and I’ll discuss how their lives changed in the next chapter.

Satisfied with Oneself

Figure 6.5. The sociometer plunge of 2012. Percent of U.S. students (8th, 10th, and 12th grade) who said they were satisfied with themselves. (Source: Monitoring the Future.)

Girls are especially vulnerable to harm from constant social comparison because they suffer from higher rates of one kind of perfectionism: socially prescribed perfectionism, where a person feels that they must live up to very high expectations prescribed by others, or by society at large. [39] (There’s no gender difference on self-oriented perfectionism , where you torture yourself for failure to live up to your own very high standards.) Socially prescribed perfectionism is closely related to anxiety; people who suffer from anxiety are more prone to it. Being a perfectionist also increases your anxiety because you fear the shame of public failure from everything you do. And, as you’d expect by this point in the story, socially prescribed perfectionism began rising, across the Anglosphere nations, in the early 2010s.

Jessica Torres, who ran a plus-size fashion blog, wrote an essay titled “How Being a Social Media Influencer Has Impacted My Mental Health.” In it she said,

The hundreds of dollars and time spent on one Instagram photo felt like a waste. Nothing was perfect enough to post. Even though I was preaching self-love, I was doing the complete opposite with myself. I kept comparing my Instagram page to other influencers whose images were prettier. I began to measure my personal worth and the value of my work with the amount of likes my images were getting. [40]

Since the dawn of advertising, young women have been enticed to pursue seemingly “better” versions of themselves. But social media exposes girls to hundreds or even thousands of such images every day, many of which feature girls too good to be true, with perfect bodies living perfect lives. Exposure to so many images is sure to have a negative effect on comparison machines.

Researchers in France exposed young women either to media photographs of very thin women or to media photographs of average-sized women. [41] They found that the young women exposed to images of very thin women became more anxious about their own body and appearance. But here’s the surprising thing: The images were flashed on a screen for just 20 milliseconds, too fast for the women to become consciously aware of what they had seen. The authors conclude that “social comparison takes place outside awareness and affects explicit self-evaluations.” This means that the frequent reminders girls give each other that social media is not reality are likely to have only a limited effect, because the part of the brain that is doing the comparisons is not governed by the part of the brain that knows, consciously, that they are seeing only edited highlight reels.

A 13-year-old girl on Reddit explained how seeing other girls on social media made her feel, using the same words as Alexis Spence and Olivia Rodrigo:

i cant stop comparing myself. it came to a point where i wanna kill myself cause u dont want to look like this and no matter what i try im still ugly/feel ugly. i constantly cry about this. it probably started when i was 10, im now 13. back when i was 10 i found a girl on tiktok and basically became obsessed with her. she was literally perfect and i remember being unimaginably envious of her. throughout my pre-teen years, i became “obsessed” with other pretty girls. [42]

Striving to excel can be healthy when it motivates girls to master skills that will be useful in later life. But social media algorithms home in on (and amplify) girls’ desires to be beautiful in socially prescribed ways, which include being thin. Instagram and TikTok send them images of very thin women if they show any interest in weight loss, or beauty, or even just healthy eating. Researchers for the Center for Countering Digital Hate created a dozen fake accounts on TikTok, registered to 13-year-old girls, and found that TikTok’s algorithm served them tens of thousands of weight-loss videos within a few weeks of joining the platform. [43] The videos included many emaciated young women urging their followers to try extreme diets such as the “corpse bride” diet or the water-only diet. This is what happened to Alexis Spence on Instagram back in 2012.

Facebook itself commissioned a study on how Instagram was affecting teens in the United States and the U.K. The findings were never released, but whistleblower Frances Haugen smuggled out screenshots of internal documents and shared them with reporters at The Wall Street Journal . The researchers found that Instagram is particularly bad for girls: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression.... This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”? [44] The researchers also noted that “social comparison is worse” on Instagram than on rival apps. Snapchat’s filters “keep the focus on the face,” whereas Instagram “focuses heavily on the body and lifestyle.”

Reason #2: Girls’ Aggression Is More Relational

Boys were long thought to be more aggressive than girls, and if we look only at violence and physical threats, they are. [45] Boys are also more interested in watching stories and movies about sports, fighting, war, and violence, all of which appeal to agency interests and motivations. Traditionally, boys have negotiated who is high and who is low in social status based in part on who could dominate whom if it came to a fight, or who can hurl an insult at whom without fear of violent reprisal. But because girls have stronger communion motives, the way to really hurt another girl is to hit her in her relationships. You spread gossip, turn her friends against her, and lower her value as a friend to other girls. Researchers have found that when you look at “indirect aggression” (which includes damaging other people’s relationships or reputations), girls are higher than boys—but only in late childhood and adolescence. [46] A girl who feels her value sinking is a girl experiencing rising anxiety. If her sociometer drop is sharp enough, she may become depressed and consider suicide. For depressed or ostracized teens, physical death offers the end of pain, whereas social death is a living hell.

Studies confirm that as adolescents moved their social lives online, the nature of bullying began to change. One systematic review of studies from 1998 to 2017 found a decrease in face-to-face bullying among boys but an increase among girls, especially among younger adolescent girls. [47] A separate study of roughly 16,000 Massachusetts high school students from 2006 through 2012 observed no increase in face-to-face bullying for girls and a decrease for boys. However, cyberbullying among girls surged. [48] According to one major U.S. survey, these high rates of cyberbullying have persisted (though have not increased) between 2011 and 2019. Throughout the period, approximately one in 10 high school boys and one in five high school girls experienced cyberbullying each year. [49] In other words, the move online made bullying and harassment a larger part of daily life for girls.

While the percentage of teens who reported being cyberbullied each year might not have risen during the 2010s, the ways in which students could perpetrate and experience relational aggression has changed as teens joined new platforms that offered new ways to spread rumors and mount attacks. Social media makes it easy for anyone, of any age, to set up multiple anonymous profiles, which can be used for trolling and reputational destruction. All of it takes place in a virtual world that parents and teachers can rarely access or understand. Additionally, as smartphones accompany adolescents to school, to the bathroom, and to bed, so too can their bullies.

In a 2018 Atlantic story about bullying on Instagram, [50] Taylor Lorenz tells the story of Mary, a 13-year-old girl who made it onto the cheer team while a friend did not. The (former) friend used many of Instagram’s features to damage Mary’s standing with other students. “There was literally a group chat on Instagram named Everyone in the Class but Mary,” she said. “All they did on there was talk bad about me.” The episode caused Mary to have the first panic attacks of her life.

Social media has magnified the reach and effect of relational bullying, placing immense pressure on girls to monitor their words and actions. They are aware that any misstep can swiftly go viral and leave a permanent mark. Social media fuels the insecurity of adolescence, already a period where there is immense concern about the possibility of ostracism, and has thus turned a generation of girls away from discover mode and toward defend mode.

Freya India, a Gen Z British woman who writes about girls and mental health, wrote an essay titled “Social Media’s Not Just Making Girls Depressed, It’s Making Us Bitchy Too.” In the essay she wrote,

From anonymous Instagram hate pages to full-blown teenage cancel culture campaigns, today’s girls can drag each other down in all kinds of creative ways. Then there’s passive aggression, today personified by the subtweet, the “soft block” (where you block and then unblock someone in quick succession, so they no longer follow you), the read receipt; even a public tag in an unflattering photo. [51]

Once again, the transition to phone-based life in the early 2010s upended girls’ relationships and lives. Puberty was already a fraught time of transition, with heightened need for a few close friends. Then social media came along to make the transition harder by making relational aggression so much easier and status competition so much more pervasive and public. Many suicides by adolescent girls have been directly linked to bullying and shaming facilitated by social media platforms, including platforms such as Ask.fm and NGL (Not Gonna Lie), which were designed explicitly to encourage users to anonymously broadcast their thoughts about other people. [52]

Reason #3: Girls More Easily Share Emotions and Disorders

We all know that our close friends can affect our moods. But did you know that your friends’ friends affect you too? The sociologist Nicholas Christakis and the political scientist James Fowler analyzed data from a long-running survey of the residents in Framingham, Massachusetts, called the Framingham Heart Study. [53] The study focused on physical health, but Christakis and Fowler were able to use items in the survey to study the way emotions moved through the community over time. They found that happiness tends to occur in clusters. This was not just because happy people seek each other out. Rather, when one person became happier, it increased the odds that their existing friends would become happier too. Amazingly, it also had an influence on their friends’ friends, and sometimes even on their friends’ friends’ friends. Happiness is contagious; it spreads through social networks.

In a follow-up study, Christakis and Fowler teamed up with the psychiatrist James Rosenquist to see whether negative emotional states, such as depression, also spread in networks, using the same data set. [54] There were two interesting twists in their findings. The first was that bad was stronger than good, as is almost always the case in psychology. [55] Depression was significantly more contagious than happiness or good mental health. The second twist was that depression spread only from women. When a woman became depressed, it increased the odds of depression in her close friends (male and female) by 142%. When a man became depressed, it had no measurable effect on his friends. The authors surmise that the difference is due to the fact that women are more emotionally expressive and more effective at communicating mood states within friendship pairs. When men get together, in contrast, they are more likely to do things together rather than talk about what they are feeling.

The Framingham Heart Study ended in 2001, just before the arrival of social media. What do you suppose happened to communities of teens after 2010, when they became far more tightly interconnected than the adults in the Framingham study? Given that depression and anxiety are more contagious than good mental health, and given that girls are more likely to talk about their feelings than boys, we might expect a sudden burst of depression and anxiety as soon as large numbers of girls joined Instagram and other “sharing” platforms, around 2012.

That is exactly what happened, as I showed in chapter 1. In multiple countries, girls’ depression rates rose rapidly in the early 2010s. So did their rates of self-harm and psychiatric hospitalization. But depression is not the only disorder spread by social media.

In 1997, Leslie Boss, then a researcher at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, published a review of the historical and medical literature on “sociogenic” epidemics. [56] (“Sociogenic” means “generated by social forces,” as opposed to biological causation.) Boss noted that there are two variants that recur throughout history. There is an “anxiety variant” in which abdominal pain, headache, dizziness, fainting, nausea, and hyperventilation are the most common symptoms, and there is a “motor variant” in which the most common symptoms are “hysterical dancing, convulsions, laughing, and pseudoseizures.” These “dancing plagues,” as they are called by historians, occasionally swept through medieval European villages, leading some townspeople to dance until they died from exhaustion. [57] For both variants, when they have occurred in recent decades, medical authorities have been unable to find any kind of toxin or environmental pollution that could have caused these symptoms. What they do find, repeatedly, is that adolescent girls are at higher risk of succumbing to these illnesses than any other groups and that the outbreaks are more likely when there has been some unusual recent stressor or threat to the community. [58]

Boss noted that these epidemics spread along social networks via face-to-face communication. In more recent times, she noted, they spread by reports in the mass media, such as television. Writing in 1997, in the first years of the internet, she offered this prediction: “Development of new approaches in mass communication, most recently the Internet, increase the ability to enhance outbreaks through communication.”

She was prescient. When adolescents moved onto image-based social media platforms, especially video-oriented platforms such as YouTube and later TikTok, they hooked themselves up in a way that facilitated the transmission of psychogenic illnesses. As soon as they did this, rates of anxiety and depression surged around the world, particularly among adolescent girls. Much of the adolescent mental illness epidemic may be the direct result of the anxiety variant spreading by two distinct psychological processes. First, there is simple emotional contagion, as described by Fowler and Christakis. People pick up emotions from others, and emotional contagion is especially strong among girls. Second, there is “prestige bias,” which is the social learning rule I described in chapter 2: Don’t just copy anyone; first find out who the most prestigious people are, then copy them. But on social media, the way to gain followers and likes is to be more extreme, so those who present with more extreme symptoms are likely to rise fastest, making them the models that everyone else locks onto for social learning. This process is sometimes known as audience capture —a process in which people get trained by their audiences to become more extreme versions of whatever it is the audience wants to see. [59] And if one finds oneself in a network in which most others have adopted some behavior, then the other social learning process kicks in too: conformity bias.

When the COVID pandemic arrived in 2020, both the disease and the lockdowns made sociogenic illness more likely. COVID was a global threat and stressor. The lockdowns led teens to spend even more time on social media, especially on TikTok, which was relatively new. TikTok was especially enticing to adolescent girls, and what it encouraged them to do, in its early days, was to practice highly stylized dance moves that they copied from other girls—dances that spread around the world. But TikTok did not just encourage girls to dance. Its advanced algorithm picked up any sign of interest in anything and sent users more of that, often in a more extreme form. Anyone who revealed an interest in mental health was soon inundated with videos of other teens displaying mental illness and receiving social support for doing so. [60] In August 2023, videos with the hashtag #mentalhealth had more than 100 billion views. #Trauma had more than 25 billion.

A group of German psychiatrists led by Kirsten Müller-Vahl [61] noted a sudden increase in young people showing up at clinics claiming to have Tourette’s syndrome—a motor disorder in which patients emit pronounced tics, such as heavy blinking or head and neck rotations, and in which they often emit words or sounds involuntarily. The disease is thought to be related to irregularities in a part of the brain called the basal ganglia, which is heavily involved in physical movement. It usually emerges between the ages of 5 and 10, and 80% of those who have it are boys.

But the German psychiatrists could see that almost none of these patients really had Tourette’s. The tics were different, there had been no sign of the disease in them when they were young, and, most revealingly, their tics were astonishingly similar. In fact, these patients—mostly young men in this first wave—were mimicking a single German influencer who actually had Tourette’s and who demonstrated his tics in his very popular YouTube videos. These included shouting out, “Flying sharks!” and “Heil Hitler!” [62]

The German researchers wrote, “We report the first outbreak of a new type of mass sociogenic illness that in contrast to all previously reported episodes is spread solely via social media. Accordingly, we suggest the more specific term ‘mass social media–induced illness.’?”

Even though Tourette’s is mostly a male disease, once it became a popular disorder on social media, it spread faster among girls. For example, some girls in Anglo countries suddenly developed tic disorders with head shakes and the common tendency to randomly shout the word “beans.” This was triggered by one British influencer, Evie, who modeled those behaviors and shouted out the word “beans.” [63] One of the main treatments doctors prescribe for the disorder is getting off social media.

There is evidence that several other disorders are spreading sociogenically, especially via sites that feature video posts such as TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is a condition that used to be known as multiple personality disorder. It was dramatized in the 1957 movie The Three Faces of Eve . The person reports that they have within themselves different identities, known as alters , which may have very different personalities, moral profiles, genders, sexualities, and ages. There is often a “bad” alter who encourages the person to do bad things to others or to themselves.

DID used to be rare, [64] but since the arrival of TikTok, there has been an increase, primarily among adolescent girls. [65] Influencers portraying multiple personalities have attracted millions of followers, contributing to an escalating trend of self-identifying with the disorder. Asher, a TikTok influencer who describes themself as one of a “system” of 29 identities, has amassed more than 1.1 million followers. The growing interest in DID is further evidenced by the billions of views garnered by hashtags such as #did (2.8 billion), #dissociativeidentitydisorder (1.6 billion), and #didsystem (1.1 billion). [66] Naomi Torres-Mackie, the head of research at the Mental Health Coalition, encapsulated the trend this way: “All of a sudden, all of my adolescent patients think that they have [DID].... And they don’t.” [67]

The recent growth in diagnoses of gender dysphoria may also be related in part to social media trends. Gender dysphoria refers to the psychological distress a person experiences when their gender identity doesn’t align with their biological sex. People with such mismatches have long existed in societies around the world. According to the most recent diagnostic manual of psychiatry, [68] estimates of the prevalence of gender dysphoria in American society used to indicate rates below one in a thousand, with rates for natal males (meaning those who were biological males at birth) being several times higher than for natal females. But those estimates were based on the numbers of people who sought gender reassignment surgery as adults, which was surely a vast underestimate of the underlying population. Within the past decade, the number of individuals who are being referred to clinics for gender dysphoria has been growing rapidly, especially among natal females in Gen Z. [69] In fact, among Gen Z teens, the sex ratio has reversed, with natal females now showing higher rates than natal males. [70]

Some portion of this increase surely reflects the “coming-out” of young people who were trans but either didn’t recognize it or were afraid of the social stigma that would attend the expression of their gender identity. Increasing freedom of gender expression and growing awareness of human variation are both forms of social progress. But the fact that gender dysphoria now often appears in social clusters (such as a group of close friends), [71] the fact that parents and those who transition back to their natal sex identify social media as a major source of information and encouragement, [72] and the fact that gender dysphoria is now being diagnosed among many adolescents who showed no signs of it as children [73] all indicate that social influence and sociogenic transmission may be at work as well.

Reason #4: Girls Are More Subject to Predation and Harassment

You know those stories about middle-aged women who befriend adolescent boys on gaming platforms and then send them money and ask for pictures of their penises as a prelude to meeting for sex? Neither do I. Women’s sexuality, in its many variations, is rarely predatory in that way.

According to the evolutionary psychologist David Buss, [74] male and female minds come equipped with certain emotional responses and perceptual sensitivities that helped them to “win” at the mating game as it was played long ago. Both sets of cognitive adaptations influence mating and dating today, but the male set makes men more likely to use coercion, trickery, and violence to get sex, and to focus on adolescents as their targets. [75]

In many regions of the virtual world, some men prey upon teen and preteen girls. Older men prey upon boys too, using online dating apps for gay and bisexual men to find them. [76] But brushes with sexual predators are a larger part of internet life for girls than they are for boys, requiring greater reliance on defend mode. [77]

The journalist Nancy Jo Sales followed a number of teenage girls who attended suburban American high schools. In her 2016 book, American Girls , she noted that attention from adult men online is frequent, because the apps make little or no effort to restrict interactions between adults and minors. Lily, a high schooler from Garden City, New York, put it this way:

It’s so easy for older predators to go online and just find a girl... because girls want the most friends and they want the most followers and likes, so if someone tries to friend them they’ll just friend them back right away without even knowing who they are. So even if it’s a serial killer, they still friend them back and maybe even start talking to them. It’s scary. Especially since a lot of girls will post pictures of themselves like in their bras and bathing suits, and the people they friend back can see those pictures. [78]

Lily and her peers are often exposed to this kind of attention from adult male strangers. But the predation and exploitation also come from their male classmates. Sales described how nude photographs function as a kind of currency in many middle and high schools. A middle school student in New Jersey told her that boys in her grade try to persuade girls to send them nude photos of themselves, which the boys then sell to high school boys in exchange for alcohol. A group of high school girls she spoke to in Florida told her that asking for and sending nudes was commonplace:

What percentage of girls were sharing nudes? I asked. “Twenty... thirty?” they guessed. “The thing is, with boys,” Cassy said, “if you don’t send them nudes, they say you’re a prude.” “Or scared,” said Maggie. Had a boy ever asked them for nudes? I asked. “Yes,” they said. “They blackmail you,” Cassy said. “They say, Oh, I have embarrassing pictures of you, if you don’t send nudes I’ll send them all out on social media.” [79]

When girls’ nudes are sent around, it can be devastating and often begins a round of cyberbullying. Boys, however, are less likely to suffer when pictures of their penises are shared. In fact, boys often send such photos to girls as bait, to elicit a reciprocal nude photo. A high school girl named Nina tells Sales, “A girl who sends naked pictures, she’s a slut, but if a boy does it, everyone just laughs.” [80]

Girls on social media platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat are exposed to the direct messages of adult men who seek them out, and also to school cultures in which photos of their naked bodies become a currency for social prestige among boys, a currency that girls pay for with shame. Sexual predation and rampant sexualization mean that girls and young women must be warier, online, than most boys and young men. They are forced to spend more of their virtual lives in defend mode, which may be part of the reason that their anxiety levels went up more sharply in the early 2010s.

Quantity over Quality

Social media, as it is commonly used by teens today, increases the quantity of social connections and thereby reduces their quality and their protective nature. Freddie deBoer, an American author and blogger who writes about education, explains why:

If we’re dividing the hours of the day and our mindshare between more and more relationships relative to the past, we’re almost certainly investing less in each individual relationship. Digital substitutions for real-world social engagement reduce the drive to be social but don’t satisfy emotional needs.... I think this created a really powerful trap: this form of interaction superficially satisfied the drive to connect with other people, but that connection was shallow, immaterial, unsatisfying. The human impulse to see other people was dulled without accessing the reinvigorating power of actual human connection. [81]

When everything moved onto smartphones in the early 2010s, both girls and boys experienced a gigantic increase in the number of their social ties and in the time required to service these ties (such as reading and commenting on the posts of acquaintances or maintaining dozens of Snapchat “streaks” with people who are not your closest friends). This explosive growth necessarily caused a decline in the number and depth of close friendships, which you can see in figure 6.6.

The clinical psychologist Lisa Damour says that regarding friendship for girls, “quality trumps quantity.” The happiest girls “aren’t the ones who have the most friendships but the ones who have strong, supportive friendships, even if that means having a single terrific friend.” [82] (She notes that this is true for boys as well.) Once girls flocked onto social media platforms and had fewer long talks with one or two special friends, they found themselves immersed in a vast sea of transient, unreliable, fair-weather “friends,” followers, and acquaintances. Quantity trumped quality and loneliness surged, as you can see in figure 6.7. It rose for boys too, but as we’ve seen several times before, the rise for boys was not concentrated so closely around the year 2012.

Have a Few Close Friends

Figure 6.6. The percentage of U.S. high school seniors who agreed or mostly agreed with the statement “I usually have a few friends around that I can get together with.” Rates dropped slowly before 2012, and more quickly afterward. (Source: Monitoring the Future.) [83]

Often Feel Lonely

Figure 6.7. Percent of U.S. students (8th, 10th, and 12th grade) who agreed or mostly agreed with the statement “A lot of times I feel lonely.” (Source: Monitoring the Future.)

This is the great irony of social media: the more you immerse yourself in it, the more lonely and depressed you become. This is true both at the individual level and at the collective level. When teens as a whole cut back on hanging out and doing things together in the real world, their culture changed. Their communion needs were left unsatisfied—even for those few teens who were not on social media.

After considering the four reasons that girls are particularly vulnerable, we can see why social media is a trap that ensnares more girls than boys. The lure is the promise of connecting with friends—enticing for girls who have strong needs for communion—but the reality is that girls are plunged into a strange new world in which our ancient evolved programming for real-world communities misfires continuously. Girls in virtual networks are subjected to hundreds of times more social comparison than girls had experienced for all of human evolution. They are exposed to more cruelty and bullying because social media platforms incentivize and facilitate relational aggression. Their openness and willingness to share emotions with other girls exposes them to depression and other disorders. The twisted incentive structures of social media reward the most extreme presentations of symptoms. And finally, the progress that many societies have made to reduce sexual violence and harassment in the real world is being counteracted by the facilitation of harassment and exploitation by companies that put profits above the privacy and safety of their users.

In Sum

Social media harms girls more than boys. Correlational studies show that heavy users of social media have higher rates of depression and other disorders than light users or nonusers. The correlation is larger and clearer for girls: Heavy users are three times as likely to be depressed as nonusers.

Experimental studies show that social media use is a cause , not just a correlate, of anxiety and depression. When people are assigned to reduce or eliminate social media for three weeks or more, their mental health usually improves. Several “quasi-experiments” show that when Facebook came to campuses, or when high-speed internet came to regions and provinces, mental health declined, especially for girls and young women.

Girls use social media a lot more than boys, and they prefer visually oriented platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, which are worse for social comparison than primarily text-based platforms such as Reddit.

Two major categories of motivations are agency (the desire to stand out and have an effect on the world) and communion (the desire to connect and develop a sense of belonging). Boys and girls both want each of these, but there is a gender difference that emerges early in children’s play: Boys choose more agency activities; girls choose more communion activities. Social media appeals to the desire for communion, but it often ends up frustrating it.

There are at least four reasons why social media harms girls more than boys. The first is that girls are more sensitive to visual comparisons, especially when other people praise or criticize one’s face and body. Visually oriented social media platforms that focus on images of oneself are ideally suited to pushing down a girl’s “sociometer” (the internal gauge of where one stands in relation to others). Girls are also more likely to develop “socially prescribed perfectionism,” in which a person tries to live up to impossibly high standards held by others or by society.

The second reason is that girls’ aggression is often expressed in attempts to harm the relationships and reputations of other girls, whereas boys’ aggression is more likely to be expressed in physical ways. Social media has offered girls endless ways to damage other girls’ relationships and reputations.

The third reason is that girls and women more readily share emotions. When everything moved online and girls became hyperconnected, girls with anxiety or depression might have influenced many other girls to develop anxiety and depression. Girls are also more vulnerable to “sociogenic” illnesses, which means illnesses caused by social influence rather than from a biological cause.

The fourth reason is that the internet has made it easier for men to approach and stalk girls and women and to behave badly toward them while avoiding accountability. When preteen girls open social media accounts, they are often followed and contacted by older men, and they are pressured by boys in their school to share nude photographs of themselves.

Social media is a trap that ensnares more girls than boys. It lures people in with the promise of connection and communion, but then it multiplies the number of relationships while reducing their quality, therefore making it harder to spend time with a few close friends in real life. This may be why loneliness spiked so sharply among girls in the early 2010s, while for boys the rise was more gradual.