Many adolescents have social media accounts despite being underage

Key takeaways:

• Despite not meeting most platforms’ age requirements, 63.8% of youth aged younger than 13 had at least social media account.
• Some teens reported having an account that their parents did not know about.

Nearly 70% of adolescents report having at least one social media account, including 63.8% of youth aged younger than 13 years, according to a report in Academic Pediatrics.

“Underage use of social media may be associated with several health concerns,” Jason M. Nagata, MD, associate professor of pediatrics in the division of adolescent and young adult medicine at University of California San Francisco, and colleagues wrote. “Previous studies have documented that adolescent screen use was associated with several morbidities including psychological consequences, such as anxiety and depression.”

In June of 2024, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy, MD, MBA, called for warning labels on social media platforms, arguing that social media use has contributed to the youth mental health crisis.

Nagata and colleagues analyzed data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, which included 11,875 children across the . They investigated social media use from 2019 through 2021 for 10,092 adolescents (48.3% girls; median age, 12.9 years; standard deviation, 0.97 years).

More than two-thirds (69.5%) of participants said they had at least one social media account, Nagata and colleagues reported. The most popular social media apps among teens with social media accounts included TikTok (67.1%), Instagram (66%), YouTube (64.7%) and Snapchat (60.3%). Participants reported having an average of 3.63 (SD, 1.89) accounts and spending an average of 0.19 hours (SD, 0.25) on social media per day.

Additionally, 63.8% of children aged younger than 13 years had at least one account, with an average of 3.38 (SD, 1.82) accounts.

“This is particularly notable as most social media platforms (including all of the platforms specifically listed in this study) require users to be 13 years of age or older, but a lack of robust age verification makes it possible for underage individuals to make social media accounts,” Nagata and colleagues pointed out.

Girls were more likely to use TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram and Pinterest, whereas boys were more likely to use YouTube (P < .001 for all).

The researchers learned that 6.3% of teens with social media accounts had a secret account their parents did not know about.

One in four teens said they spent a lot of time thinking about social media (25.3%) and that they used social media to forget about their problems (25.2%).

“Policies that protect early adolescents on social media, such as more robust age verification and enhancement of parental controls and privacy settings, should be implemented,” Nagata and colleagues wrote. “Pediatricians can educate parents and early adolescents regarding the potential risks of underage social media use, and also the protective roles that parents can play.”