The annual World Happiness Report revealed that the impact of social media applications on mental health is not uniform, but varies greatly depending on the type of platform and how it is used.
The World Happiness Report 2026, released on Thursday, stated that intensive use of social media is contributing to a sharp decline in well-being levels among young people, with particularly worrying effects on adolescent girls in English-speaking countries and Western Europe.
While apps that rely on algorithms and endless scrolling, such as Instagram and TikTok, have been shown to have a negative impact on mental health, other platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp, which focus on direct communication with friends and family, have shown a positive impact on life satisfaction.
The annual report from the Oxford University Centre for Wellbeing Research, in collaboration with Gallup Analytics and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, found that excessive use of social media is causing unhappiness among young people worldwide, although the effect is most pronounced in English-speaking countries and Western Europe.
The report showed that Finland topped the list of the happiest countries in the world for the ninth year in a row, along with other Nordic countries such as Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, which maintained their positions in the top ten.
The report highlighted the significant decline in life ratings among those under 25 in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand over the past decade, noting that long hours spent browsing social media are a major factor in this trend.
The study included an in-depth analysis of the relationship between the type of applications used and the level of happiness. A study in 17 Latin American countries showed that frequent use of WhatsApp and Facebook is associated with greater life satisfaction, while the use of X, Instagram, and TikTok platforms, which are more subject to algorithms and influencer content, leads to decreased happiness and the emergence of psychological problems.
In the Middle East and North Africa region, another study confirmed almost the same result, showing that applications that rely on passive viewing and visual content, and those that are predominantly about following influencers, are the most harmful to users’ mental health.
Professor Jean-Emmanuel de Neve, director of the Centre for Wellbeing Research, commented on these findings, saying: "This suggests that we need to bring the social aspect back to social media, and urge both providers of these platforms and users to use these tools for social purposes and to connect with real people."
Surprisingly, the research also revealed that limited social media use—an hour or less per day—leads to greater life satisfaction than no use at all, except for those without internet access. De Neve explains, "There's an ideal zone here, not too much and not too little. Moderate, positive use seems to be optimal. But the problem is that the average social media use in the data wasn't an hour or less, but rather around two and a half hours."
However, the report cautions against oversimplifying the problem, finding that young people's happiness varies considerably around the world, even in countries where social media is equally prevalent. In Lithuania, for example, young people's well-being is significantly higher than in the United States or the United Kingdom, despite having similar access to social media platforms.
De Neve concludes that the picture is more complicated than it appears: "You can't just blame social media; there are many other factors at play."
