The release last month of internal documents detailing Instagram’s effect on the mental health of young teenage girls has brought the issue of digital wellbeing back to the forefront.

The concern is not new – researchers have been calling on tech companies to share data on the topic for years – but it is pressing. Mobile broadband penetration is now over 100% in the OECD, and the average time teens spend online is generally trending upwards. Between 2012 and 2015, for instance, the weekly average time spent on internet by 15-year-olds increased nearly 40% to reach 29 hours. By 2018, the figure had reached 35h - an average of 5h per day, 3.8h of which were spent outside of school. Meanwhile, an OECD survey suggests that adolescents using internet for 6+ hours/day are most likely to experience lower wellbeing.

Generally, researchers believe there are two main avenues through which technology impacts wellbeing. The first is around engagement — what do we use tech for, how often do we use it, and how does that usage substitute for healthy behaviors and activities, such as reading or going outside. The other concerns how technology is designed. Social media and the algorithms that underlie them, for example, are often accused of optimizing for our attention instead of for our wellbeing, which impacts our technology engagement.

The combination of those factors has led many to worry about possible negative effects, from mental health to internet addiction, as well declines in attention span and increases in political polarization. There are, of course, positive effects too. Action video games, for instance, have been shown to enhance attentional abilities and may also help improve an individual’s working memory. Therapists also use online gaming to treat mental health issues like depression or anxiety in teens and children.

The real question, therefore, is about the scale of the compound effect. At the moment, however, there is no conclusive evidence on this front. This is in part because assessing a causal link between technology (over)use and wellbeing presents a difficult technical problem – many of the studies produced so far measure correlation not causation, for example. It’s also in large part because most of the relevant data needed to study the possible causation resides in the private sector, which may not have the right incentives to rigorously study these impacts on their own. Researchers and legislators have called to release this data to independent third-party researchers but companies have not always been forthcoming with the information.

Stronger intervention might thus be necessary to secure the data needed for evidence-based policy-making. One way to do so could be to create secure, privacy-preserving ways for researchers to access companies’ data. Promoting corporate accountability and transparency will also be important. This could be done by requiring tech companies to disclose of the mental health externalities created by their products or activities or, at a minimum, an articulation of the steps that companies are taking to ensure that their products do no mental health harm.

In the meantime, policymakers are left to regulate in with limited evidence at hand. China, as part of a wave of tech regulation, has chosen the quantity-based approach, banning videogames on weekdays for under-18s (and limiting play to one hour daily on weekends). Some, like the proposed SAFE DATA Act in the U.S., focus on prohibiting companies from creating user interfaces that compel compulsive usage in users under 13.

Tech companies— some more publicly than others — have acknowledged digital wellbeing as something that needs to be actively cultivated. Google, for example, has toolkits, partnerships and research streams dedicated to the topic. But stewarding technology towards the common good is about making sure we design and develop systems that empower us to make healthy choices. This cannot be left to companies alone.

Wellbeing in the Digital Age