Pop-up messages that warn of the harms of social media could help reduce youth’s social media use, a new study found.
Alcohol and tobacco products have health warnings about the negative impacts. Researchers say that social media could benefit from similar warnings too, such as “Using social media causes sleep problems. This is bad for your health,” and “Social media is associated with significant mental health harms for children and young adults.”
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Exactly such pop-up messages showed up in a study published on JAMA Health Forum. The messages informed about the harmful impact of social media — such as depression, anxiety, worsened body image and sleep disruption. Researchers hope this could be yet another tool in the toolbox aimed at managing youth’s social media time more healthily.
“With substances like tobacco and alcohol, we find, on average, that well-designed warning labels change behavior,” lead study author Anna Grummon, assistant professor of paediatrics, said. As social media is a completely different product compared to cigarettes or alcohol, “where you just put the warning on the product and it lives there,” these warnings have to be “basically pop-ups,” Grummon said.
Researchers saw that over 1,000 youth aged 13 to 29-years increased their understanding of social media risks to their mental well-being after being exposed to 14 warnings on six health topics while scrolling. The warnings covered social media addiction, negative body image, sleep disruption, depression, anxiety, overall mental health harms and the fact that social media has not been proven safe for young people.
Participants consistently reported that the warning messages would reduce their social media use, authors said.
Youth rated each message in response to two questions: “How much does this message discourage you from wanting to use social media?” and “How much does this message increase your awareness of the harms of using social media?”
The messages that worked the best were those that warned about mental health harms, such as depression and anxiety, except the addiction warning.
While the data does not show why those messages performed best, “if I were to speculate, I would say that these are harms that resonate with people,” Grummon said. “People may think, ‘That’s right, I can see that happening to my friends or to me,’ and these are outcomes people care about.”
