What The Company Learned About Social Media and Harms to Mental Health from Dozens of Internal Studies.
Compiled by Bennett Sippel, Nikolaus Greb, Emma Park, Zach Rausch, and Jonathan Haidt at the Tech and Society Lab at NYU Stern.
Date launched: January 13, 2026. Last updated: February 18, 2026.
Brief Summary
In this project we gather and summarize reports of all of the available internal research studies that Meta has carried out related to the question of whether its products — particularly Instagram — are harming young people.
These reports come from two primary sources: Whistleblowers who brought out thousands of screenshots or other records of internal company communications, and lawsuits filed by various state Attorneys General, who obtained documents in the process of discovery. To date we have located reports of 31 such studies. We will continue to update this page as more studies and information are revealed.
On this “Central Doc” you will find an overview of the project, some cautions around the limitations of our sources, and then brief summaries of the studies themselves, organized by the methods employed for each study.
For those who want to go deeper, we have also compiled three supplements that contain all of the available information about the 31 known studies:
- Supplement 1: All of the studies. This is a publicly viewable Google Doc with one tab/page for each study. Each tab/page contains all of the information we have located.
- Supplement 2: 99 Exhibits from Francis Haugen, as posted by the Attorney General of Tennessee.
- Supplement 3: All of the lawsuits. This is a Google Doc that links to all of the briefs posted by the various Attorneys General and other plaintiffs who are suing Meta.
Read the following studies to see what Meta’s own internal research reveals about how its products harm young people — and how the company has responded to that knowledge. The studies show that Meta has obtained extensive evidence, from many different kinds of research, that its products facilitate and enable vast direct harms to young people (e.g., cyberbullying, unwanted sexual contact) and that its products are likely harming users’ mental health, particularly for adolescent girls, particularly via harmful social comparisons, promotion of eating disorders, body-image problems, and increased depression.
We will continue updating this page as new studies and documents become public, and we welcome tips, corrections, and additional materials from researchers, journalists, policymakers, and others who wish to contribute to this record.
Clickable Table of Contents:
Line 4. Cross-Sectional Studies
- 4.1 Social Comparison on Instagram Wellbeing Research (November 2018)
- 4.2 Sensitive High Negative Appearance Comparison (“High-NAC”) Content – A 3-Study Series (2021)
Line 7. Internal Conceptual Models and Review Papers
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Footnotes
…….
Conclusion
Meta has carried out many studies on the effects of its products on adolescent wellbeing. We have found descriptions of 31 of them. Across these 31 studies, which used a variety of methods, the company learned repeatedly that its products — particularly Instagram — are harming young people on a vast scale. The company’s leaders know about many of these harms, and in several identifiable cases they failed to act. Meta researchers talked with each other about their findings, noting that Meta’s leadership reacted negatively, not constructively, when they learned about harms. This is exactly what happened to whistleblower Arturo Béjar when he reported the results of the BEEF survey (Study 1.1), as he explained in his Senate testimony.
Here is one more example, an excerpt from a chat between two Meta researchers:
“oh my gosh yall IG is a drug…We’re basically pushers… We are causing Reward Deficit Disorder bc people are binging on IG so much they can’t feel reward anymore…like their reward tolerance is so high…I know Adam [Mosseri] doesn’t want to hear it – he freaked out when I talked about dopamine in my teen fundamentals leads review but its undeniable! Its biological and psychological….the top down directives drive it all towards making sure people keep coming back for more. That would be fine if its productive but most of the time it isn’t…the majority is just mindless scrolling and ads.”
—School Districts v. Social Media, p. 33
When Mark Zuckerberg testified before the U.S. Senate, under oath, he made two statements that are true: “Mental health is a complex issue,” and “There is a difference between correlation and causation.” But when he said, “The existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health outcomes,” he was saying something at odds with Meta’s own research. 15
This collection of studies demonstrates that Meta used a great variety of methods to study the effects of its products, and they found a great variety of harms, including evidence of causal impact.
The most compelling evidence of causality is found in Project Mercury, in which users were randomly assigned to stop using Facebook and Instagram for a week. The researchers found that those who stopped using these social media platforms experienced notable improvements in their mental health. Meta’s leadership discussed these findings and searched for ways to dismiss them. During the discussion, one Meta employee warned:
“If the results are bad and we don’t publish and they leak, is it going to look like tobacco companies doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves?” 16
The results have leaked, and Meta is starting to look an awful lot like Big Tobacco.
Source – Meta’s Internal Research – last updated 18feb2026
