🎧 Listen | 5:14 mins
A lot has changed since Mark Zuckerberg’s infamous testimony in 2018 before the US Congress. His smirky response, “Senator, we run ads,” became the meme heard around the world, as legislators were mocked for being out of touch with the technology they were supposed to keep in check.
Eight years later, the tide has turned. Keeping young people off of social media is the latest trend. From Australia to Europe, governments are passing laws to ban social media for teens. And Meta’s recent settlement over alleged harms to youth – the latest in a string of lawsuits across the United States – has been widely celebrated, correctly, as a win for holding Big Tech accountable.
But fixing tech isn’t the same thing as improving youth mental health.
There’s no question that young people are struggling. A third of American adults under 30 rate their mental health poorly, more than double the proportion of adults over 50, according to a Pew Research study from April.
What’s also clear is that Gen Z — once called the Google Generation — grew up with social media and has a very different relationship with it than older people. With Google starting in 1998 and Facebook in 2004, the platforms are practically Gen Zers themselves.
And there is research to support links between social media use and well-being. A 2025 study in Nature found that adolescents with existing mental health issues were more likely to spend time on social media than those without.
Put it all together, and the answer seems clear: Fix the technology, and we can get back on track.
I get why that’s appealing. For a long time, I believed it too.
I moved to Silicon Valley in 2011, as tech’s “disruption” era was taking off. I arrived as wide-eyed as a newbie in Hollywood, with $20 in her pocket and a guitar on her back. From San Francisco to San Jose, idealists like me flocked to coworking spaces and filled up cafes, convinced that technology would be a Great Equalizer where society was broken and power was uneven. Uber could break up corrupt taxi systems. Bumble could give women power in dating. Facebook could platform the voiceless.
By the mid-2010s, the shine was already wearing off. The same platforms that expanded access and opportunities also created new risks and exacerbated old ones. Accordingly, I moved from building new products to enforcing safeguards on them. After Meta’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, I joined the company, still believing that technology could be a net positive to society; we just needed to design it better and put the right guardrails in place.
But after years of changing company policies, testing new products, tweaking features, and funding programs, I had to face the truth:
Tech is powerful. But it cannot fix society’s problems.
When it comes to the well-being of the young people at the heart of the social media debate, research points to a much broader set of contributing factors. Candice Odgers, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, calls caregivers’ mental health “the strongest predictor of children’s mental health and life chances.” She points to the rise in parental loss among American children over the past two decades, driven largely by firearm deaths and drug overdoses.
And a 2024 review in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing examined 56 peer-reviewed studies on adolescent anxiety. It identified several contributing factors, including family dynamics, crippling academic pressure, climate change, and political uncertainty.
These problems won’t get solved because it’s harder to get on Instagram. And they’re not problems that Mark Zuckerberg can fix, nor would anyone want him to.
The good news is that some solutions can be surprisingly simple, like being present and spending time together. According to the American Psychological Association, having strong relationships with adults is “the single most powerful force for adolescent mental health.” And non-parental figures – like coaches, teachers, and other mentors – matter as much as parents and family members.
Platforms absolutely deserve to be scrutinized, but ultimately, they’re not responsible for the well-being of the young people in our lives. We are. And we owe them more. ◾