Mental Health v. Social Media: How US pretrial filings against social media platforms frame and leverage evidence for claims of youth mental health harms

Abstract

Major social media platforms face an onslaught of lawsuits and regulatory efforts related to concerns about mental health harms for underage users. This project investigated the claims and research evidence in pretrial filings for three prominent US lawsuits filed against major social media platforms in 2023. We examined these pretrial documents as sites of formative public discourse about potential social media harms, and of major efforts to frame a new US public policy problem. We first analyzed how these filings framed social media as a population-level mental health threat for adolescents, drawing comparisons with how prominent consensus reports frame the problem. We found major differences in these framing strategies, with lawsuits largely lacking public health approaches, and in particular, an attention to the potential disparate and varying harms of platforms among users. We then categorized and assessed the lay and research literature cited in the filings to support their claims. We reviewed filing documents and extracted all citations within them, coding them categorically, and then conducted a mapping literature review of all the research articles cited in the suits, coding these references for additional categorical variables. We found that filings were heavily reliant on non-research sources. Among the research cited there was little that documented a causal link between social media and youth health harms. Legal filings did not frame, or cite research documenting, this emerging public health problem as one that has disparate impacts among marginalized users, despite ample research attention to this issue. As the debate around the mental health harms of social media grows larger and more political, this research demonstrates limitations in how litigation is framing this public health problem, as well as in how existing public health research can inform regulatory efforts.