Moving towards informative and actionable social media research

Abstract: Social media is nearly ubiquitous in modern life, and concerns have been raised about its putative societal impacts, ranging from undermining mental health and exacerbating polarization to fomenting violence and disrupting democracy. Despite extensive research, consensus on these effects remains elusive, with observational studies often highlighting concerns while randomized controlled trials (RCTs) yield conflicting or null findings. This review examines how the complexity inherent in social systems can account for such discrepancies, emphasizing that emergent societal and long-term outcomes cannot be readily inferred from individual-level effects. In complex systems, such as social networks, feedback loops, hysteresis, multi-scale dynamics, and non-linearity limit the utility of approaches for assessing causality that are otherwise robust in simpler contexts. Revisiting large-scale experiments, we explore how null or conflicting findings may reflect these complexities rather than a true absence of effects. Even in cases where the methods are appropriate, assessing the net impacts of social media provides little actionable insight given that eliminating social media is not a realistic option for whole populations. We argue that progress will require a complexity-minded approach focused on specific design choices of online platforms that triangulates experimental, observational and theoretical methods.