Australia’s largest survey of young people has linked poorer life satisfaction among high school students to regular social media use.
Researchers at the Australian National University (ANU) found that young people who regularly use TikTok, Reddit or Discord had lower life satisfaction than those who did not use these platforms.
Overall, teenage girls who use social media reported lower levels of wellbeing than boys.
Non-binary students who regularly use social media reported the lowest levels of life satisfaction.
Survey
ANU led a decade-long study on “the impact of regular use of certain social media platforms” on 3,500 Year 10 and 11 students from around 300 Australian schools.
The top three most popular social media platforms were: Instagram (86%) followed by Snapchat (76%) and TikTok (72%).
Nearly all participants (98%) used at least one social media platform regularly. More than half (56%) said they use seven or eight platforms “regularly”.
Life satisfaction
Participants were asked to rate their life satisfaction on a zero to ten scale from “completely dissatisfied” to “completely satisfied”.
Girls averaged 6.1 out of ten, while non-binary young people reported an average satisfaction score of 5.2.
Boys reported the highest average score of 6.5. They also had the highest rate of “passive” users – people who
never post or share on social media – at 27%.
For girls and non-binary respondents, this was 16% and 11% respectively.
Social Media
The study looked at the impacts of specific platforms on users’ satisfaction levels.
Boys and girls who used TikTok, Reddit and Twitch regularly had lower life satisfaction than those who did not use these platforms.
Regular TikTok use was linked with the poorest life satisfaction for teenage girls, averaging 5.95 out of 10.
The lowest satisfaction levels among teen boys were Reddit (6.31) and Discord users (6.37). Discord is a messaging platform.
The study also found that Discord users from every group (male, female and non-binary) had overall lower life satisfaction scores.
However, it found some platforms have a positive impact on life satisfaction.
For all genders, this included Facebook. X (formerly Twitter) had a positive impact on non-binary respondents.
ANU said no significant life satisfaction variations were reported by Instagram and Snapchat users, “most likely as there was a high proportion of young people using these platforms.”
