Regrets, I’ve Had a Few; But Then Again, Time on Social Media May Not Be One of Them

The issue of whether social media use does or does not influence adolescent well-being remains a pressing concern for policymakers, parents, and researchers. As evidence of the harmful effects of social media, some point to the fact that young adults frequently regret the time they spent on social media when they were younger. However, highlighting a single instance of retrospective regret as a proxy for harm may be misleading. Our objective in this study is to provide a more accurate and contextually grounded assessment of social media regrets by benchmarking them against a broader set of common teenage regrets, as rated by young adults. We then determine which teenage regrets predict current life satisfaction. Four hundred young adults aged 20–24 from Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States were recruited via the Prolific platform and completed an online survey assessing the potency of 20 retrospective regrets when they reflect on their teenage years. Our findings indicate that social media was not a prominent source of regret when young adults reflect on their teenage years. In addition, regrets about social media use were not associated with current life satisfaction, but other regrets were. As such, our findings are consistent with other prior studies suggesting that at the population level, the harmful effects of social media use on adolescent well-being may be overstated. However, these results should be interpreted with caution and may not reflect the experience of all individuals within this population.