Is Social Media Wrecking Their Friendships?

What the largest review found

In December 2023 the National Academies published a review of the research on social media and teenage health. Its own summary is blunt. It is also not what most of the coverage implies.

The committee's review of published literature "did not support the conclusion that social media causes changes in adolescent health at the population level". It found that the research linking social media to health "shows small effects and weak associations".

Candice Odgers, a psychologist, made a similar point in Nature in March 2024. She wrote that the idea that digital technologies are rewiring children's brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness "is not supported by science".

That is not a claim that nothing is happening. It is a claim that the evidence for the strong version is weaker than the confidence around it.

The case on the other side, stated fairly

This site does not pick a winner in a live dispute, and there is a real one here. Researchers who think the harms are being played down have three arguments worth stating properly.

First, studies that pay people to switch off their accounts tend to find benefits. That is a stronger design than most of the work in this field, which can only show that two things go together.

Second, the gap between girls and boys keeps turning up across studies. It is hard to write off as noise.

Third, teenage mental health got worse in many countries at about the same time. A change in many countries at once is hard to pin on causes specific to one of them.

None of that settles the question. It does mean that anyone telling you it is closed, in either direction, has gone past the evidence.

What teenagers say about friendship specifically

This is the part that surprises parents, and it is the most directly relevant evidence on the question in the title.

Pew surveyed 1,391 US teenagers aged 13 to 17 between 18 September and 10 October 2024 and published in April 2025. Seventy-four percent said what they see on social media makes them feel more connected to what is going on in their friends' lives. Asked about their friendships directly, 30 percent said social media helps them, against 7 percent who said it hurts them.

That is a wide gap, in the opposite direction to the public conversation. On friendship in particular, teenagers' own reports skew positive, and the aggregate research finds small effects.

A finding from a different study belongs beside it. Researchers looked at rising loneliness among teenagers across 38 countries, from 2000 to 2022. More internet access went with less loneliness, not more. That is a correlation and not a cause. It is also the opposite of what the standard story predicts.

The harm that does have good evidence

Forty-five percent of the teenagers in that same Pew survey said social media hurts their sleep.

That is six times the share who said it hurts their friendships, and it points at the harm that is best supported generally. The better evidenced problems here are displacement harms: things that get pushed out of the day, with sleep at the top of the list. They are not direct damage to friendship quality.

This is useful because it tells you where to spend the argument you are willing to have. A fight about whether they may use the app at all is expensive and hard to justify from the evidence. A rule about where the phone charges overnight is cheap, specific, and aimed at the thing the evidence actually supports.

When online is where the friendship is

For some teenagers, an online friendship is not a substitute for the real thing. It is the real thing. That is particularly true if they live somewhere rural, if they are disabled, if their interest is unusual, or if talking to people is easier in writing.

The legitimate worries are narrow and specific rather than general: contact from adults, anyone grooming, sleep, and one sided intensity where one person needs far more than the other.

Two of these are not matters of judgment and should be said out loud early, in plain language:

• Anyone who is cagey about their age, or who turns out to be an adult.
• Anyone who asks for photos.

In both cases: block, and tell an adult. That is the floor. Everything else on this page is a discussion. Those two are not.

What this page cannot tell you

Whether the field will settle differently in five years. It might. The deactivation experiments are a serious result and the international pattern is a serious puzzle, and honest researchers on both sides are still arguing about them.

What it can tell you is where the evidence sits today. On friendship specifically the reports from teenagers run positive and the measured effects are small. The harm with the best support is sleep. And the strong claim, that phones are wrecking a generation's friendships, is currently ahead of what anyone has shown.