Stanford Seminar - Understanding Social Media's Role in Mental Health

January 17, 2025 Munmun de Choudhury, Georgia Tech Understanding Social Media's Role in Mental Health: Causal Perspectives and Interdisciplinary Pathways Social media platforms can foster emotional expression, peer support, and connectedness, yet they can also amplify challenges like anxiety, depression, and stress through negative interactions, exposure to misinformation, or harassment. Much of the current understanding in this domain relies on cross-sectional analyses of public social media data or self-reported information, which are limited in their ability to capture the nuances of real-world experiences or in establishing causality. To address these gaps, I advocate for approaches that integrate computational and social science methodologies. The talk will narrate a series of interlinked studies that harness naturalistic, longitudinal social media data from both public and private channels gathered through multi-year, multi-prong, multi-context human- and mental health stakeholder-centered engagements, and that pair causal inference and natural language analytic techniques. I will discuss how this enriched approach points to a complex picture: for instance, while disclosing life events on platforms like Facebook can enhance wellbeing, online harassment in private digital spaces can significantly harm mental health. Situated in these findings, the talk will reflect on the importance of interdisciplinary collaborations in advancing the study of social mediaâ s impact on mental health, ethical considerations in analyzing behavioral data, and practical implications for designing interventions that can be nimble to today's rapidly evolving online ecosystems. I will conclude by highlighting my involvements in various policy-framing national and international initiatives as a step toward shaping a future where social media platforms center on promoting well-being for one and all. About the speaker: Munmun De Choudhury is an Associate Professor at the School of