Young people starting to use social media at early age perform worse in certain subjects

A recent Italian study found that students who begin using social media platforms at an earlier age tend to perform worse in certain school subjects than their peers.

Researchers from the University of Milano-Bicocca surveyed the social media habits of more than 5,000 Italian students and analyzed their test scores in math, Italian, and English.

Among the 13- and 14-year-olds surveyed, those who created their first social media accounts between the ages of 11 and 12 performed worse on exams than those who did not create accounts until at least age 14.

The study found that the performance gap was significant in math and Italian, but no such effect was observed in English, suggesting that a large share of the content consumed by the surveyed students on social media may already have been in English.

Marco Gui, an associate professor of sociology and one of the study's authors, said that while the findings are complex, the research suggests that social media use is problematic, at least during the pre-adolescent period.

The findings were published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.