Around 5.6 billion people worldwide use social media. But does spending time online actually make us unhappy? And could our genetics influence how we use these platforms? At the InScience Film Festival, researcher Selim Sametoğlu discussed what his latest research suggests about the relationship between mental health, genetics, and social media use.
By Jitse Amelink
Teenagers have not been doing well lately. GenZ is unhappier and reports more mental health problems than older generations. It’s tempting to blame the other big change that arrived at the same time: social media and smartphones. The most prominent voice calling for action is social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose book The Anxious Generation argues for restricting young people’s access to social media. Many have heeded his call, and Australia has even banned social media for children under 16. While these concerns have gained widespread attention, the scientific evidence is far less clear-cut.
Does social media actually make you unhappy? Most of the evidence is rather mixed, actually. Some studies find a small negative effect, other studies no effect and again others a mixed effect. It matters for example whether you actively post or message people or passively scroll. However, none of the large-scale summaries, what scientists call meta-analyses, point to a large negative effect for social media use on well-being. Turns out: it’s more complicated than we thought.
Selim Sametoğlu, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, saw these findings and wanted to understand the causative path. “Could it maybe be the other way around?”, he says. “Could it maybe be that mental health problems cause higher social media use?”
Genetics could shed some light on this. By examining data from the nearly 7,000 participants in the Netherlands Twin Registry, the largest database of Dutch twins, Sametoğlu investigated the relationship between well-being, mental health problems (depressive and anxious symptoms) and social media use. Identical twins share virtually all of their DNA with each other, whereas fraternal twins share half on average. This can help us estimate the combined contribution of genetics to an outcome like social media use.
Sametoğlu found that individual differences in social media use are partly heritable, with genetic factors explaining between 36% and 72% of the variation, depending on how use is measured. Your genetics explains a moderate, but substantial part of how often you use social media. These numbers are in the range for most psychological measures, such as personality traits (around 40%) or anxiety disorders (30-50%).
Think of heritability less like a fixed property of a gene and more like a snapshot: it can shift depending on the environment people grow up in. It is a number that indicates the ratio between genetic and environmental contributions to differences between individuals. In different circumstances this ratio may be entirely different. In addition, heritability indicates the combined effect of all genes, not one gene specifically.
Our genetics contribute to mental health problems, well-being and social media use. But are these the same genes? Is there a genetic correlation? Sametoğlu finds that they are genetically related but that the overlap is pretty modest. Lower well-being relates genetically a little bit to higher social media use (genetic correlation between -0.1 and 0) and more mental health problems relate genetically slightly to social media use (genetic correlation between 0.1 and 0.23). The overlap in genetics is small, but it’s there.
However, genetics explain most of the correlation we see. This suggests that part of the link between social media use and mental health may stem from shared genetic influences. In other words, people who are genetically more prone to mental health problems may also be somewhat more likely to use social media intensively.
Sametoğlu therefore suggests not banning social media, but having moderate policies in place that prevent the most harm, such as content moderation, enforcing minimum age requirements that platforms already have, and parent-child education for social media.
Sametoğlu heartily concurs with the words from Candice Odgers’ review published in Nature: “When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental health problems use such platforms more often, or in different ways from their healthy peers.”
If this interpretation is correct, social media may not be the primary cause of declining mental health among young people. Instead, it may be one of the places where existing struggles become visible.
“Are we trying to find a scapegoat?” Sametoğlu asks. “Social media may not be the villain we sometimes imagine.”
Sources:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10519-025-10224-2
Credits:
- Writer: Jitse Amelink
- Editor: Anniek Corporaal
- Second editor: Anna Mai
- Dutch translation: Anniek Corporaal
- German translation: Jule Hafermann
