Social media is vilified. Critics argue it’s addictive, anxiety-inducing, destructive to teens’ body image and an easy platform for bullying. According to most research, these critics are right. More than 20 studies linked social media use to adverse mental health effects like depression and anxiety. The academic consensus is damning: social media deals more than its fair share of damage to Americans’ wellbeing and particularly to the American youth.

We’ve heard this message loud and clear. More U.S. teens than ever see social media as harmful: 48% classified it as a net harm in a 2025 survey, while just 32% said the same in 2022.

But here’s the problem: despite this recognition, social media overuse is still climbing. Nearly half of American teens use social media “almost constantly” as of 2024, up from 24% a decade prior. While many factors can be blamed for this rise — including regulatory inaction and “enshittification” — our messaging around social media is partly to blame. 

Social media is a tool, just like so many digital innovations, and tools can be used for both good and bad. Framing it as purely the enemy isn’t working. Instead, we need to change our tone on social media to reflect that it has real benefits — they just need to be upheld better.

First, to see why this tone shift is so important, we have to understand that for most people, leaving social media behind frankly isn’t realistic — no matter how much we hammer home the negatives, social media isn’t a parasite we can simply discard. Many approaches have tried to do that; for instance, Reconnect Stanford argues for quitting social media as a group to increase accountability. Another popular approach is a “digital detox,” or a short-term period of abstinence from social media, which some have proposed as a less extreme alternative to permanent withdrawal. 

But the research on both long-term and short-term abstinence is mixed at best: a meta-analysis of 10 different studies found no significant mental health benefits of abstinence interventions. For most, abstinence doesn’t seem to work; digital connection is a deep-seated part of our lives, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. At Stanford, technology not only plays a significant direct role in social life, but also influences the organizations around students. Nearly every club and student organization maintains a social media account; employment opportunities are widely accessible on these platforms; nightlife announcements often emerge and circulate as posts. Given that more than 95% of teens are already on social media, the question is no longer whether to disengage, but how to engage with it more responsibly.

Worse, our stark condemnation of social media may even be exacerbating its detriments. One recent study found that because we frequently label these online platforms as addictive, many people overestimate their overuse. These users fall into a self-fulfilling prophecy — people who see themselves as more addicted are even less able to moderate their usage. In this way, our alarmism can backfire, intensifying rather than ameliorating harmful behaviors.

Perhaps most importantly, while criticism of social media has its place, we lose an integral part of the conversation when we disregard its benefits. For one, social media acts as a vanguard of global cultural exchange. Online platforms can enable cultural connection at a distance, which is especially important for diaspora groups. More broadly, social media also fosters a community of its own. Digital platforms offer unique shared experiences for people from diverse backgrounds. Those shared experiences are the basis for connection and belonging; it’s nice to be in on the joke, so to speak.

Further, social media can be a lifeline for many otherwise isolated minority groups. LGBTQIA+ youth living in rural areas of the US are particularly vulnerable to depression and suicidality due to their isolation. A critical source of connection and support for this demographic is social media platforms like Instagram. Stripping away that resource would be detrimental to their mental health, not productive.

Moreover, many of social media’s undesirable characteristics are the same features that allow for its sweeping benefits. We can hear more diverse takes than ever because social media is an accessible way to share nuanced and disparate opinions. But online platforms offer that same pathway to misinformation, amplifying its reach and threat to public health. The very same opportunity for social connection that defines social media can also give rise to isolation and low self-esteem from self-comparison with idealized representations of our peers’ lives.

But the closest thing we have to a solution is maybe the last thing Stanford students, notoriously fond of the extremes, want to hear: moderation. As a 2025 study of American teens suggests, addictive use, rather than mere casual usage, is the primary source of social media’s adverse effects. The same rings true for college students in specific: problematic use is the most clear link to harm. Social media is a wonderful way to enhance our existing relationships; it becomes detrimental only when it becomes our primary form of connection. In a perfect world, social media helps us keep up with people over distance, but doesn’t override our personal lives or supplant human interaction. 

Truthfully, we may not be able to extricate these benefits from the disadvantages, but we can tip the scales by reducing social media’s role in our relationships and thus its power to interrupt our lives.

In addition, embracing moderation doesn’t mean we have to accept social media in its current form. We can’t forget that the owners of online platforms engineer them to be more addictive. A landmark legal verdict in Los Angeles recently held Meta and YouTube liable for their addictive features, which may open the floodgates for legal restrictions on harmful features. 

So yes, we urgently need to address the health crisis that social media has brought about. But that urgency doesn’t have to manifest as constant guilt; it shouldn’t preclude us from taking advantage of online platforms, and we certainly shouldn’t let that awareness be harmful in itself.

When we over-villainize social media and ignore its benefits, we make the crisis worse. Considering social media’s cultural entrenchment — especially among teens and young adults — we must rethink our attitude toward it to both recognize its utility while promoting pragmatic solutions to overuse.