English-Speaking Teens' Happiness Plummets as Social Media Use Soars
A sweeping global study finds teens in the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand grew sharply unhappier over the past decade — while young people almost everywhere else did not.
While young people across most of the world grew happier over the past decade, teenagers in English-speaking countries moved in the opposite direction — and the timing tracks closely with the rise of social media. The World Happiness Report, released Thursday, found life evaluations among under-25s in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand dropped by nearly a full point on a 10-point scale from the 2006–2010 period to 2023–2025.
The Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford compiled the findings, drawing on data from 100,000 respondents across 140 countries in the annual Gallup World Poll, plus 270,000 15-year-olds surveyed in the PISA study. Across nearly every other region, youth wellbeing rose.
"Most young people in the world are happier today than 20 years ago, and this is a trend that deserves our attention," said Jon Clifton, CEO of Gallup.
Teenagers in English-speaking nations stand apart from their international peers. They report the same social media habits as young people elsewhere — but carry a heavier emotional burden for it.
Screen time matters, though not in a simple, linear way. Young people who use social media less than one hour per day reported the highest wellbeing — higher even than non-users. Heavy users logging seven or more hours daily showed markedly lower wellbeing than light users. The average adolescent, the study found, spends 2.5 hours per day on social media.
The gender divide cuts even deeper than screen time alone. Girls showed consistent declines in life satisfaction as usage increased, across regions. Boys showed the same pattern only in Western Europe and English-speaking countries. Among the starkest data points: 15-year-old girls who use social media five or more hours daily report lower life satisfaction than peers who use it less.
What matters is not just how much teens scroll, but where they scroll. Platforms built to facilitate genuine social connections showed positive associations with happiness. Algorithmically curated platforms built around influencers and visual content showed negative associations at high usage rates — with passive consumption of algorithmic feeds proving more damaging than platforms that connect people to one another.
Geography adds another layer of complexity. Latin America showed positive links between social media and wellbeing despite heavy usage, with researchers pointing to strong family ties and social bonds as likely explanations. The Middle East and North Africa showed similar positive associations, with youth wellbeing holding steady despite high usage levels in both regions.
The report acknowledges that most evidence linking social media use to youth wellbeing remains correlational, and that broader social conditions may contribute to the declines. Some studies, however, do provide causal evidence — and the population-level shifts are hard to dismiss.
Australia moved first. In December 2025, it became the world's first country to ban social media for children under 16, setting a precedent others may follow. Jonathan Haidt, a Stern School of Business professor and chapter contributor to the report, supports the urgency behind such measures. "Social media is harming adolescents at a scale large enough to cause changes at the population level," he said.
The picture, though, resists simple conclusions. Researchers found that young people who deliberately avoid social media appear to miss some of its positive effects. "The global evidence makes clear that the links between social media use and our wellbeing heavily depend on what platforms we're using, who's using them and how, as well as for how long," said Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, director of the Wellbeing Research Centre and editor of the World Happiness Report.
The report was released ahead of the United Nations' International Day of Happiness on March 20. Finland retained the top spot in the 2026 rankings for a ninth consecutive year. No English-speaking country appeared in the top 10 for the second consecutive year — the United States ranked 23rd, Canada 25th and the United Kingdom 29th. Costa Rica climbed to fourth place, the highest-ever ranking for a Latin American country.
One data gap clouds the picture for the very countries at the center of the crisis. The United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand lack representation in the 2022 PISA study covering 47 countries, forcing researchers to rely on Gallup data alone to track youth wellbeing trends there. De Neve's prescription, at least, is direct: "We should try to put the social back into social media."