Do you doomscroll? If so, you’re not alone. One 2024 survey found that almost a third of American adults regularly doomscroll—that is, swipe through endless social media feeds—and millennials and Gen Zers are even more likely to engage in this behavior.
This is partly because social media feeds often have no end, so users continuously scroll to get to the next thing that catches their attention—and the next after that. These design features keep users on social media platforms—but they have also been criticized as a pathway to problematic social media use and even addiction.
But is it possible for someone to become addicted to social media in the same way as they can develop an addiction to nicotine or alcohol, say? The answer is more complicated than you might think.
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The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has an entire center dedicated to digital well-being, the Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health. On its website, it explains that concerning social media use might include behaviors such as struggling in school because of technology or withdrawing socially—but that concerning use may not always rise to the level of “addiction.”
The issue of whether social media is addictive is at the center of thousands of lawsuits brought against the companies Meta, TikTok, YouTube and Snap. The verdict in one of these cases, involving Meta and YouTube, could be decided as soon as this week.
To try and understand what the science says about social media and addiction, we spoke to two experts in the field: Jenny Radesky, co-medical director of the AAP’s social media and youth mental health center, and Bradley Zicherman, a clinical associate professor at Stanford University, who directs the Youth Recovery Clinic and treats patients struggling with social media.
“I tend to think of addictive use as being a subset or a more intense or severe form of the larger umbrella of problematic media use,” Radesky says. The AAP encourages a broader (and less stigmatizing) term to talk about the issue: “problematic Internet use.”
Zicherman is more comfortable describing this kind of problematic behavior as addiction. “It is most appropriate at this point to actually say that there is a condition of social media addiction,” he says.
Zicherman likens social media to slot machines: “Because you don’t know when you’re going to win,” he says, “you keep pulling that slot machine lever, pressing the button, pressing the button, pressing button—eventually you win something.”
He argues that social media features such as likes, followers and never-ending new content feeds function in much the same way, triggering a rush of dopamine that some users will keep chasing. Dopamine, a neurotransmitter, helps the brain identify pleasurable experiences—say, validation or success or even a good meal—and to repeat behaviors linked to them. Substances like drugs, however, can make the process go haywire.
The AAP notes that in a 2021 Common Sense Media survey, tweens said they spent about 18 minutes per day on social media, while teenagers devoted about an hour and a half, on average. And there is evidence that comes with some risks: One study published last May, for example, analyzed data from 11,876 children enrolled in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, a large, long-term investigation that has been tracking children’s mental health over time. The May paper showed that an individual’s increase in social media use correlated with increased signs of depression in the following year. Interestingly, the reverse wasn’t true—children who had higher “depressive symptoms” didn’t necessarily use social media more later on.
Conversely, some studies suggest social media use can have some benefits. A recent study that included more than 100,000 Australian students in grades four to 12 showed that older adolescents who engaged in moderate social media use after school—up to 12.5 hours per week—had higher scores on measures of well-being than those who didn’t use social media at all.
Why is the research so mixed?
Part of the reason why there are such conflicting results is that social media and addiction is hard to study, Radesky says. Researchers often rely on study participants to self-report how they feel about a digital product, and these reports are not always reliable and are inherently subjective. Collecting phone data doesn’t offer a full picture either. Scientists could perform brain scans to look at how social media affects the brain’s reward centers, but that would require teenagers to undergo magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans—which would also not exactly be a true snapshot of their real-life social media use, Radesky says.
Adults can have an unhealthy relationship with social media, but Zicherman says that children and younger users may be particularly vulnerable. Some platforms, such as Meta’s Instagram, have taken steps to limit younger users on the platform, including by offering special teen accounts or by limiting how long younger users can be on the app. But some of these age-based restrictions may be ineffective, not least because some kids may be able to get around them, Zicherman says.
“We’ve intentionally designed automatic defaults like Sleep Mode that encourage teens to leave the app and pause notifications over night. Parents can go even further by restricting their teens’ total time to as little as 15 minutes a day or setting scheduled breaks when teens are required to exit our apps,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement, adding that the company now uses artificial intelligence to help verify young user’s ages. Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Addictive or not, social media platforms benefit from holding users’ attention, the experts argue. Some studies suggest people may seek out social media to dissociate—mindlessly scrolling purely to give their brain a break. But that behavior could also lead to “a loss of agency,” Radesky says.
“[There] are all these design features that keep us going and going and going,” she says. These include never-ending feeds, autoplay and “engagement-based algorithms” that optimize for content that keeps users hooked. “Whether or not it was intentional, I think it simply is designed to be addictive,” Zicherman says.
Additional reporting by Allison Parshall.