London - Widespread fears over the harmful effects on teenagers of spending hours on social media could be misplaced, according to a major British study.
It claims online activity only has a "trivial" effect on their happiness, flying in the face of research and the prevailing opinion of many parents.
The survey of 12 000 teenagers in this country suggests that less than one percent of adolescent unhappiness can be blamed on the use of sites such as Facebook.
Lead co-author Professor Andrew Przybylski, of the University of Oxford, said: "Time shouldn’t be the thing parents are worrying about."
He added society should "retire the notion" of focusing on the amount of time which young users spend online.
Instead, research should examine if particular aspects of online behaviour have negative impacts on mental health, such as looking at potentially harmful pages or posts. The study said leading social media companies have data which could shed light on the problem but were reluctant to share it with scientists.
The researchers added: "We show that social media effects are not a one-way street. They are nuanced, reciprocal, possibly contingent on gender, and arguably trivial in size."
Professor Przybylski said the debate over internet usage often focused on tragedies but added: "Tragedies are a poor form of evidence."
The study followed teen social media use from 2009 to 2016 as part of a long-term survey of UK households. It concluded that lower life satisfaction led to an increase in activity while social media use led to lower life satisfaction but the trends were only "modest".
Co-lead author Amy Orben said: "What this shows us is we need to stop looking at social media as a whole and to think about the nuances."
She added statistical analysis concluded that "99.75 percent of a young person’s life satisfaction for a given year has nothing to do with how they use social media".
This indicated that such websites account for "less than one percent" of a teenager’s life satisfaction.