What’s the Impact of Social Media on Youth Well-Being?

The news is rife with breathless headlines about the risks of social media for teens, feeding into growing parental concern about digital media’s impact on their children. In response, legislators are moving to curtail or block young people’s access to social media; e.g., in 2024, Australia’s parliament approved a social media ban for youth under 16, and other countries are considering doing the same. Meanwhile, kids and teens report mostly positive experiences with social media and overwhelmingly want the freedom to access it. Is the public concern about social media justified, or is this a moral panic? What does research say about the impact of social media on youth well-being? 

Speaker Bio

Vani Henderson first joined Google in 2007, and now heads the User Experience Research team for Kids and Families at YouTube. Her work directly influences how hundreds of millions of families interact with YouTube. Over the course of her career at Google, Vani has led research on a range of products, including Maps, Identity, and ads. Vani completed her PhD in Communication at the Annenberg School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2005, focusing on media effects on teen health outcomes, and was a post-doc at the Stanford Prevention Research Center. She holds an MS from Cornell University and a BA from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Her academic background in communication psychology continues to inform her human-centered approach to product research. When not at work, you can find Vani working with local dog rescue organizations, hiking in the San Francisco Bay area, and spending time with her husband and two teenagers.