Negative feelings about life are more common among teens on Instagram and TikTok

A recent survey of teenagers suggests that a large portion of young people encounter negative experiences on the internet, and the types of harm they face tend to vary depending on which apps they use. The research indicates that while some issues like bullying occur at similar rates in person and online, teenagers are much more likely to be exposed to violent imagery or unwanted sexual content through digital platforms. The findings were published in JAMA Pediatrics.

The term “online harms” refers to a wide range of negative experiences on digital platforms, such as cyberbullying, unwanted sexual advances, or exposure to content that encourages self-injury. Prior studies have demonstrated that digital platforms host a variety of risks for adolescents.

For example, a 2022 survey study found that different types of online sexual abuse, such as nonconsensual sexting or grooming by adults, occur at varying rates among youth. Additionally, a study covered by PsyPost in 2026 indicated that nearly half of adolescents who send sexually explicit images experience nonconsensual sharing or extortion.

Most existing research tends to examine one specific type of negative experience at a time, such as harassment, rather than capturing the full spectrum of issues adolescents face. When studies do measure these risks, they rarely break the numbers down by specific platforms to see how experiences might differ on an app like TikTok compared to an app like YouTube. To explore this, research covered by PsyPost in 2025 found that short-form video apps are associated with more severe body image concerns, suggesting that specific app designs might play a role in user well-being.

The research, led by Angela Y. Lee, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication who was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford Medicine’s Center for Digital Health when the study was conducted, aimed to estimate how often adolescents report various negative experiences both online and offline. “This study was the product of a great collaboration of researchers from Stanford, USC, NYU, and UW-Madison, working across psychology, communication, medicine, technology policy, and consumer science,” Lee told PsyPost.

“There are widespread concerns about youth online safety and recent steps, like social media bans and age-gating policies, have been recently implemented around the world,” Lee noted. “At the same time, there are ongoing debates about how people interpret the research on social media’s effects on youth psychological well-being, and what kinds of interventions should be implemented.”

By tracking how these experiences differ across twenty popular communication platforms, the researchers hoped to demonstrate a method for gathering platform-specific data that could inform targeted prevention efforts.

“This study was motivated by something that I feel is a common goal across researchers across the aisle and policymakers, which is a need for clear, consistent, and granular measurement of youth’s online experiences,” Lee explained. “Our team’s hope is that knowing how often teens report having negative experiences on specific platforms can help add specificity to conversations about social media and well-being effects, and inform efforts to track if interventions that are implemented are meaningfully reducing reported harms.”

To conduct the study, the researchers used a nationally representative, probability-based sample of 472 adolescents in the United States between the ages of 13 and 17. The survey was administered between February and December 2025. Participants answered questions about their use of 20 online communication platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube, over the previous four weeks.

The survey asked the teenagers to report whether they had encountered specific negative experiences either offline or across the various platforms they used. These experiences included direct harassment, witnessing harassment, receiving unwanted sexual images, encountering violent content, seeing content that encouraged self-harm, and experiencing sleep disruption due to technology use. The research team then applied statistical weights to the data to ensure the results accurately reflected the broader population of adolescents in the United States.

The results indicated that exposure to negative experiences is common among teenagers. Across both online and offline contexts, 44.7% of the adolescents had witnessed someone else being harassed, and 29.8% reported experiencing direct harassment themselves within the four-week window. Interestingly, direct harassment was reported at similar rates offline (18.5%) and online (16.4%), suggesting that this type of conflict happens across all areas of a teenager’s life.

For other types of harm, the internet proved to be a much more common source of exposure than the offline world. The teenagers reported seeing violent imagery online at a rate of 10.7%, compared to just 1.6% offline. Similarly, 13.4% of respondents encountered unwanted sexual images online, while only 2.0% experienced this offline. Content encouraging self-harm was seen by 9.7% of adolescents online, compared to 5.2% offline. Additionally, over half of the participants (51.5%) reported that their technology use disrupted their sleep.

The study also found substantial variations depending on the specific platforms the adolescents were using. For instance, 9.1% of Instagram users reported seeing violent imagery, compared to just 1.9% of YouTube users. The feeling that one’s life is worse because of other people’s posts was most common on Instagram (16.6%) and TikTok (13.4%), while it was much lower on YouTube (4.1%) and text messaging (5.6%).

Sleep disruption also seemed to be concentrated on certain apps. A total of 42.2% of TikTok users and 27.8% of Instagram users attributed their disrupted sleep to those platforms. In comparison, only 10.2% of teenagers blamed text messaging for their sleep issues.

The researchers noted that factors like parental education, household income, and the presence of parental controls on smartphones were not statistically associated with a higher or lower likelihood of experiencing online harm.

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. First, the study relies on a relatively modest sample size of 472 adolescents. When looking at less popular platforms or rare experiences, the small number of users limits how precise the estimates can be.

“Although this is a nationally representative sample of American teens, it’s a relatively small sample and this was a pilot study,” Lee said. “The results should not be taken to say definitively that X platform has Y amount of harms, but rather can be thought of as illustrating how reported harms vary from platform to platform and from harm to harm. We do hope to be quite clear that this is a pilot!”

Second, the findings are based on self-reported memories over a four-week period. This approach is subject to recall bias, meaning teenagers might be more likely to remember highly emotional events while forgetting milder, everyday interactions. Stigmatized events, such as receiving or sending explicit images, might also be underreported due to social desirability or embarrassment.

Another detail to consider is that adolescents might simply attribute their negative experiences to the apps they spend the most time on, rather than the exact place the harm occurred. Because teenagers often use multiple apps at once, it can be difficult for them to pinpoint exactly where they saw a distressing video or received a hurtful message.

Finally, the differences in reported harms across platforms might reflect the types of people who choose to use those apps, rather than just the design of the apps themselves. For instance, if a specific platform is highly popular among teenage girls, who generally report higher susceptibility to social comparison, that app might show elevated rates of body image concerns regardless of its layout or content moderation policies.

“This is cross-sectional survey data, so it cannot be used to draw causal claims,” Lee added. “We can’t say that ‘using platform X causes American teens to see unwanted content Y’ but we can say that adolescents using platform X were more likely to report seeing content Y. We also do not know what the effects of such reported harms are on youth well-being, though that is something we hope to address in future research.”

Future research using larger samples could help clarify how specific platform features directly influence user experiences.

“In the near future, we’re in the process of preparing to field a new, larger study with American adolescents and their parents that will allow us to examine how youth report experiencing online harms across a broader set of platforms – including AI chatbots and AI companion apps,” she said. “We think this next step is important because the digital landscape of youth media use is changing rapidly, and measurement efforts need to keep up to understand where, when, and how youth are being negatively impacted.”

“Long-term, I am hopeful that studies like ours – and those conducted by nonprofit and academic entities – can show that investment in monitoring youth online experiences can provide valuable insights that can help inform efforts to implement and evaluate interventions,” Lee concluded.

The study, “Adolescents’ Experiences of Online Harms by Platform,” was authored by Angela Y. Lee, Carmen H. J. Lim, Sunny Xun Liu, R. Kang Xing Jin, Anneke Buffone, Ravi Iyer, Zachary Rausch, Jonathan Haidt, Nathanael J. Fast, Jeffrey T. Hancock, and Eleni Linos.