ArticleAnnals of the New York Academy of Sciences2025
Social media use, online experiences, and loneliness among young adults: A cohort study.
Article in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Pre-Post Evaluation of a Sun Safety Social Media Campaign for Young Adults to Reduce Skin Cancer Risk.JMIR dermatology · 2026Article
- Connected or chained by social media? Child and adolescent mental health in a digital era.PLoS medicine · 2026Article
- The impact of physical activity on the psychological wellbeing and study abroad satisfaction of Chinese international students in a cross-cultural context.BMC public health · 2026Article
- Death and grief literacy in the context of loneliness: Insights from an international symposium.Palliative care and social practice · 2026Article
- Temporal patterns of loneliness and their associations with mental health outcomes: Observations from a longitudinal study.European psychiatry : the journal of the Association of European Psychiatrists · 2025Article
- Social media use, online experiences, and loneliness among young adults: A cohort study.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
This study investigated patterns of digital technology use and their associations with loneliness in a cohort of 1632 young adults (mean age 26) in the UK who had been followed prospectively since childhood by the Environmental Risk Longitudinal Twin Study. Data were collected via an online survey in 2019-2020. Although overall time spent online was associated with greater loneliness, this was not the case for social media usage specifically. Use of social media platforms (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) showed no association with loneliness. Instead, greater loneliness was associated with the use of Reddit and dating apps, while the use of WhatsApp was associated with lower loneliness. However, individuals who reported more compulsive use of digital technology, or experiences of online victimization, were lonelier on average, suggesting that the types of experiences individuals encounter online may be more related to loneliness than using particular platforms per se. Associations were robust to controls for a prior history of depression or anxiety at age 18. Moreover, findings remained broadly consistent between those who participated before versus during COVID-19 lockdown measures. An exception was that certain types of media characterized by passive consumption were associated with loneliness prior to, but not during lockdown.
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Registered trials
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