Ian Axel Anderson, PhD

"True clinical addiction means more than overuse," @aanixel and @ProfWendyWood write. wapo.st/46I9Rms

@jayvanbavel Curious also if the snowball-style sampling procedure had an impact here (baseline survey might be informative?), as I would guess people who were having issues with social media use might be more likely to join the study (though maybe also those who enjoy it?).

A caveat: this data is longitudinal/correlational. The ideal study to examine causation would be a large RCT that manipulates social media usage as a registered report. We are running that study now in 23 countries and I'll share the results here once we have them. globalsocialmediastudy.com

Does social media harm everyone? No. But it harms *most* adolescents, according to a new study. And not all platforms have harmful effects. A new analysis of 44,211 daily diaries from 479 adolescents over 100 days finds that the majority of adolescents (60%) experienced small, but consistently negative effects of social media, suggesting that social media use is a notable contributor to mental health issues. However, a minority (13.6%) of adolescents experienced simultaneously harms and benefits across different dimensions of their mental health. Exploratory analyses revealed negative impacts of TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram use and positive or null effects of Snapchat and WhatsAp. This means that social media doesn't have to be harmful. link.springer.com/article/10.100…

Instagram users may overestimate the extent to which they are addicted to the platform, according to research conducted on 1,204 US adults published in @SciReports. go.nature.com/48oDj0Q

Thanks for covering my research!!

Thanks for covering our new study @physorg_com Instagram users overestimate their social media addiction, study suggests phys.org/news/2025-11-i…

🔑 For platforms: give users more tools to control and manage use, preferably based on the same strategies that are already being used to drive habitual, highly frequent use of platforms.

🔑 For scientists, consider using a more diverse array of measures for frequent social media use, including measures of habit, addiction, frequency, and collecting actual log data.

Are you really "addicted" to social media? Good news: probably not, at least according to my and @ProfWendyWood's new paper, available open-access from @SciReports! Thread below... 🧵

Social media users adopt the toxic behaviors of ingroup members An analysis of 7 million tweets from over 700,000 accounts find that exposures to toxic behavior by ingroup members is the primary driver of contagious toxicity online academic.oup.com/jcmc/article/3…

@caitlinsgilbert @jeremybmerrill @ccemorse Hey Caitlin! This is an awesome project!! Is there any chance that academic researchers like me could access fully anonymized data? My dissertation (osf.io/preprints/psya…) looked at Twitter/X scrolling and compared habitual & non-habitual scrollers, so I'm super interested.

This story follows our unprecedented collab with our audience to build a database of 15 million TikTok videos and associated metadata from over a thousand users’ watch histories. Read more about how @jeremybmerrill, @ccemorse and I did this here: washingtonpost.com/tiktok-app-stu…

🤳EXCLUSIVE: We analyzed data from over 800 U.S. TikTok users to reveal how the app transforms casual users into power users. Extremely proud of this one, over a year in the making w/ @richardsima Leslie Shapiro, Aaron Steckelberg, Ence Morse 🎁 link: wapo.st/4obueib

BREAKING: Apple just proved AI "reasoning" models like Claude, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini don't actually reason at all. They just memorize patterns really well. Here's what Apple discovered: (hint: we're not as close to AGI as the hype suggests)