Italian study links early social media use to declining academic performance over time

Research from northern Italy indicates that children who join social media platforms earlier tend to experience weaker academic results years later, prompting renewed debate over age restrictions and platform design for minors.

A new study adds fuel to the growing debate over whether children should be barred from social media until they are older. Researchers in northern Italy found that pupils who opened social media accounts earlier tended to record weaker academic results several years later, with the gap widening over time. The work looked at more than 5,000 students and tracked how the age at which they first joined social platforms related to later performance in maths, Italian and English.

The findings fit a wider body of research suggesting that heavier and earlier social media use can coincide with poorer school outcomes. A study in the Journal of Research on Adolescence reported that most early adolescents already have at least one social media account and that use patterns can affect academic performance, with parent-child communication and gender shaping the size of the effect. Other research indexed by PubMed has linked more media-intensive teen profiles with lower grades, while a separate longitudinal study found that high social media use in early adolescence could predict later psychosocial differences.

In the Italian study, the researchers focused on pupils who were similar in grade 5 and had not yet joined social media. Those who created accounts in grade 6, roughly ages 11 to 12, later did worse on standardised tests taken in grade 10 than classmates who waited longer. The researchers said the penalty was roughly equivalent to about half a year of learning, while students who began in grade 7 also showed a smaller but still measurable dip. By grade 8, however, the academic effect had largely disappeared.

The authors argued that starting social media earlier may encourage overuse and distract children at moments when they should be concentrating, with the harm building over time. They also said the negative effect seemed to deepen as the years passed, so that children who signed up earliest were falling further behind by the time they reached their mid-teens. At the same time, they urged caution about drawing sweeping conclusions, saying the subject is too sensitive and politically charged for simplistic readings.

The results arrive as governments move more aggressively to regulate minors’ access to digital platforms. Australia has already passed legislation restricting social media use by under-16s, while France has moved to tighten access for younger teenagers and the European Union is still weighing wider age limits. In the United States, the focus has been less on bans than on litigation: Meta, ByteDance and Google are facing thousands of lawsuits alleging that features such as infinite scroll and autoplay were designed to hook young users and keep them online for longer.