Among adults (or in “household” surveys where adults were surveyed? Sure, but the majority of teen internet users were using “social networking sites” in 2006.) [0]
If your contention is that adult social media use is driving teen suicide rates…well, that’s actually more plausible than teen use, but none of the policy responses address that.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2013/05/21/part-1-teens...
See section 6[0] where they discuss how mental health declines correlating with Facebook coming to college campuses and with high speed internet arriving in cities for some evidence.
[0] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...
This stat can't be meaningfully compared to teen suicide rates because the latter is across all teens, regardless of online/offline status. If the number of "online" teens grew dramatically between 2006 and 2013 (as I suspect it did), then the relative change in percentage of "online" teens on social media would be much smaller than the change in teens in general.
My personal experience growing up around then is that a majority of my peers weren't deep in social media and smartphone use until well into the 2010s. I didn't have a smartphone when I graduated high school in the early 2010s, and I certainly wasn't an outlier at the time.
Both were among (but not, even together, the totality of) the things I was referring to.
> Kids weren't really affected by covid
A massive wave of death, incapacitation, and serious illness that very likely struck sonewhete in their families? Kids may not have had particularly severe acute health cobsequences from COVID, but that doesn't mean they weren't affected by it.
I was using "COVID" as a shorthand for all of the changes during the pandemic.
Yes, my point is that is exactly the problem with your data. It needs to be broken down by location to account for differences in lockdowns and school closures, to claim there was any or no effect.
Will reality do?
Over recent generations, kids have systematically been robbed of critical developmental environments - primarily they are denied regular hours of unsupervised alone/peer time and expansive areas to free range.
The environments that kids absolutely need to develop social and problem solving skills have been replaced with ceaseless supervision, ceaseless containment and a soundtrack of false messaging about risk from stranger kidnapping (spoiler: FBI stats are clear that kids aren't and haven't been at meaningful risk of stranger kidnappings). At the edges of all that are justice systems/LEO/authority that stand ever-ready to transform routine stupid transgressions into forever penalties that systemically ruin future life/job/housing opportunities.
We adults have erased their life prep and endlessly notched up pressure on every front. What else do we expect to follow that except poor mental health?
As for social media's part, one has to take a lot of nuance out of teen mental health studies to single out SM as the primary driver of bad mental health. ref: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/07/21/blaming-social-media-for...
Social media and smartphones became widespread in the early 2010s, and that's exactly when teen suicides started rising. [1]
COVID does not appear to have significantly affected teen mental health [2]
If you have evidence that something else is driving the rise in teen suicide rates, I'd love to see it.
[1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...
[2] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-new-cdc-report