Juries in California and New Mexico recently found social media companies liable for opening young people to mental health harm, suicide risk and other safety issues, imposing hundreds of millions of dollars in financial penalties. Other social media companies settled out of court in the California case for unknown sums rather than await a verdict, with many more cases still pending.
Rather than waiting for legal action or regulatory changes, experts from University of Michigan Health and colleagues have developed a free “Social Media Mini Course” to help users of all ages protect their mental health. The interactive course is available through the Instagram account @socialmediaminicourse and as a webpage, with additional resources and a link to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline accessible through the Instagram bio.
Settings and Tools for Safer Use
The mini course guides users through key settings on different platforms to make their experience more positive and less risky. Featured adjustments include disabling like counts on Instagram and refreshing the For You feed on TikTok. The toolkit walks users through scenarios showing how social media use can affect mood, self-image and sleep patterns, encouraging reflection on personal use patterns and desired changes.
The course was tested with young people and incorporates advice from participants in the MyVoice study of youth, which has conducted text-message-based polling on social media and related topics in teens and young adults for years. Jane Harness, D.O., a child and adolescent psychiatrist at U-M C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, helped lead development and testing. “We are all certainly constrained by the settings offered and the design of the platforms themselves,” Harness noted. “Some young people use these features and settings, as we showed in our study several years ago, while others are not aware they exist.”
Harness identified a growing concern with AI chatbots, which may play a role in suicidal thoughts or psychosis onset. She emphasized that discussions about social media use between parents and young people are crucial. The course was created by clinical child psychologist Sarah E. Domoff, Ph.D., child psychiatrist Heide Rollings, M.D., Amy Mancuso, LMSW, and clinical psychologist Jessica Schleider, Ph.D. The team acknowledged that social media can have positive effects when used in moderation with safety settings enabled, such as connecting users with friends, family and wider information sources.
This article is an AI-assisted summary. All facts and figures are drawn from the original report: https://www.michiganmedicine.org/health-lab/how-improve-mental-health-safety-social-media-not-just-young-people