A meta-analysis of the association between adolescent social media use and depressive symptoms

•It has been proposed that social media use is associated with depressive symptoms amongst adolescents.•This metanalysis found a significant, but small correlation between adolescent social media use and depressive symptoms.•There was also high heterogeneity of effects, which suggests that there are substantial differences between studies.•Future research should focus on objective measurement of social media use and discovering moderators of these associations. The association of adolescent social media use with mental health symptoms, especially depression, has recently attracted a great deal of interest in public media as well as the scientific community. Some studies have cited statistically significant associations between adolescent social media use and depression and have proposed that parents must regulate their adolescents’ social media use in order to protect their mental health. In order to rigorously assess the size of the effect that has been reported in the current scientific literature, we conducted a meta-analysis of studies that measured the association between social media use specifically and depressive symptoms amongst early- to mid- adolescents (11-18 years-old). We searched Psychnet, PubMed, and Web of Science with the following terms: online social networks, social media, internet usage, facebook, twitter, instagram, myspace, snapchat, and depression. We found a small but significant positive correlation (k=12 studies, r=.11, p