Problematic social media use and adolescent mental well-being: a cross-national study on socioeconomic inequalities

Although the role of social media in youth mental health has been recently examined, how social inequalities structure the relationship between social media use and adolescent well-being across countries remains unclear. Employing a micro–macro framework, this study examines how family-level socioeconomic status (SES) and country-level income inequalities moderate the relationship between Problematic Social Media Use (PSMU) – a concept of risk-related social media use – and adolescents’ psychological complaints and life satisfaction. Analyses apply mixed-effect multilevel models to data from 35 countries participating in the Health Behaviour of School Aged Children (HBSC) study (N∼145,000). Results show that PSMU is associated with higher psychological complaints and lower life satisfaction consistently across countries. Yet, these effects are stronger for low-SES adolescents than for high-SES adolescents, especially for life satisfaction. At the country level, the relationship between PSMU and poorer adolescent mental well-being is curvilinear, being larger in medium-inequality countries than in both low- and high-inequality countries. Additionally, the observed SES gaps in the association between PSMU and adolescent mental well-being persist across countries with different levels of inequality. Overall, this study shows that risk-related social media behaviours may harm low-SES adolescents more than high-SES adolescents, whereas the relationship between PSMU and adolescent mental well-being is largest in countries with medium income inequality levels.