Social media and adolescent mental health: A consensus report of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

A range of digitally mediated communication platforms—loosely called as a group, social media—have transformed how the world communicates and interacts over the past decade and a half. The rise in popularity of some social media platforms has been nothing short of extraordinary. For example, Facebook, introduced in 2004, now has 2.9 billion regular users (1, 2). Snapchat has 397 million regular users, and TikTok, introduced only in 2018, has 1.7 billion regular users (2). As with all new technologies, the most common users of new social media platforms have been young people, with adolescents being the fastest adopters of these technologies and their most avid users.