Digital Minds: Assessing the interplay of social media on mental health

Social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit are deeply embedded in everyday life. They support communication, creativity, identity formation, information seeking, and peer connection. At the same time, concerns have grown about their possible links with anxiety, depression, body image dissatisfaction, compulsive use, social comparison, and exposure to harmful or misleading content. These concerns are particularly important for minors and other vulnerable users.Public debate often presents social media as either beneficial or harmful to mental health. This binary framing overlooks the complexity of the underlying processes. Psychological outcomes are shaped by interactions among individual characteristics, social context, content, platform design, recommender systems, moderation policies, and patterns of use. Engagement-driven algorithms may amplify emotionally intense, polarizing, or repetitive content and create feedback loops that reinforce distress or harmful behaviours. However, the same platforms can also connect users with supportive communities, recovery narratives, peer support, and opportunities for help-seeking.This Research Topic examines the relationship between social media and mental health, with particular attention to the computational, social, and technical mechanisms through which online environments may produce both harmful and supportive outcomes. It aims to move beyond simplified accounts of social media as inherently beneficial or harmful by studying how users, content, communities, and algorithms interact over time. Particular attention is given to minors and vulnerable populations, who may be especially affected by repeated exposure, social comparison, harmful content, and algorithmic feedback during sensitive stages of development.The issue welcomes theoretical, methodological, and applied contributions that examine social media both as a source of data for studying mental health and as an environment that may influence psychological well-being. Topics of interest include natural language processing and machine learning methods for identifying mental health signals; analysis of online mental health communities and peer-support dynamics; auditing of recommender systems, ranking mechanisms, and content moderation; computational models of user behaviour and psychological effects; causal inference, longitudinal analysis, and experimental approaches; the design and evaluation of platform-level interventions; and the creation of datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation frameworks.It aims to bring together computational social science, psychology, sociology, public health, human-computer interaction, and human-centred artificial intelligence to develop more robust, interpretable, and actionable evidence on the relationship between social media and mental health. Topic editors: Maria Sansoni, Giulio Rossetti, Dino Pedreschi, Valentina Pansanella, Virginia Morini Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/84031/digital-minds-assessing-the-interplay-of-social-media-on-mental-health