Following the publication of the results of the PISA 2025 report, the question arises as to how to interpret them and explain the possible causes of the decline in reading and maths results, both internationally and in Spain. We have sought the views of experts in education, sociology, inequality, educational technology and pedagogy.
A study published in the journal JAMA Network Open assessed the attitudes of Australian teenagers in the context of the implementation of minimum age restrictions on social media use in their country. The research team found that the majority of respondents expressed their intention to continue using social media after the regulations came into force, despite the fact that, in this sample, symptoms of anxiety and depression were associated with a history of social media use and with a younger age at the time of first use.
This week, Mark Zuckerberg’s company has agreed to introduce measures to protect teenagers on Instagram and Facebook and to pay up to 18,000 million dollars to settle a lawsuit brought by dozens of US states. The response is far from unanimous among child welfare organisations, who believe that the measures are unlikely to protect young people, given that they can be overridden by parents, will only be monitored for five years and are, to a large extent, conditional on behaviour. With these measures, responsibility is shifted onto families: if children and teenagers remain hooked, it will be their fault.
Pupils who set up a social media account in early adolescence appear to perform less well in subsequent standardised tests, according to a study published today in Nature Human Behaviour and based on a sample of 5,227 Italian pupils. The study is observational, so it does not allow for a causal link to be established between social media use and academic performance. Furthermore, it was carried out using questionnaires in which students had to recall and report on their use of these services when they were younger.
On TikTok, the vast majority (86.8 %) of videos about sunscreen promote its use, according to a content analysis of 971 of the most-viewed videos on this topic on the platform. However, the minority (6 per cent) of videos that criticise these products generate more engagement (likes, comments and shares) on TikTok, the authors warn. This misinformation stems from “small but highly influential numbers of content producers, whose shock-provoking and “sticky” content can generate considerably and disproportionately greater attention or interaction among some viewers”, they write in PLoS Digital Health.
An article published in Brain Health proposes using the concept of the ‘criticome’ to refer to the sensory, motor, social, cultural and environmental information recorded from pregnancy up to the age of 25, which is the period of greatest brain plasticity. According to the authors, this concept reframes autism, schizophrenia and depression as developmental disorders rather than purely synaptic disorders. Besides, they say this approach would have implications for educational policy, mental health care and screen use, amongst other issues.
A team from the University of California (USA) has published an article questioning the scientific evidence supporting bans on social media for teenagers. Among other reasons, they argue that studies conducted to date on restricting social media use have focused on adults. Furthermore, as one of the authors points out in a press release, these restriction experiments "show weak, negligible, and mixed effects, with 40% of experimental studies reporting harmful effects (e.g., lower life satisfaction and increased loneliness) or no effect from social media restrictions." Some of the authors, whose article is published in Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, declare having ties to companies in the social media industry.
On social network X (formerly Twitter), when users select the ‘for you’ option, the algorithm tends to steer them towards more conservative political options, according to research conducted with nearly 5,000 participants in the United States in 2023. The authors randomly assigned users to either an algorithmic or chronological feed for seven weeks. The switch from chronological to algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, especially on political priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump, and opinions on the war in Ukraine. Conversely, switching from the algorithmic feed to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. ‘Initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes,’ say the authors of the study, published in Nature.
The Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, announced on Tuesday from Dubai that Spain will ban children under the age of 16 from accessing social media and will adopt other measures to increase control over digital platforms and ensure that their executives are held accountable for violations. Sánchez made this announcement in his speech to the plenary session of the World Government Summit and announced that next week the government will approve a series of measures, including this ban.
A US research team has devised a method that uses a browser extension to alter the algorithm of X (formerly Twitter) to study its impact on user behaviour. In a 10-day experiment with 1,256 volunteers during the 2024 US presidential campaign, they used the method to vary the content expressing anti-democratic attitudes and partisan hostility. According to the authors, the results—published in Science—provide causal evidence that greater or lesser exposure to this type of content alters polarisation in the same way. Their conclusions contradict previous research published in the same journal, which found no such relationship on Facebook or Instagram. In that case, the study was conducted in collaboration with and funded by Meta.