Hi.

I’m Hank Green and I’m  addicted to social media. Or maybe I have a social media use disorder.

Whatever you call it, my relationship  with social media is not positive. And, yes, social media is addictive. But like any addiction, it’s not my fault.

Social media is designed to  hack my internal reward system and get me to check in pretty much constantly. Researchers know that social media and our brains have a messy relationship. But if you can stay away from it  long enough to watch this video, you’ll at least know how that relationship works and how those researchers  suggest we can improve it. [intro music] When I post something on Instagram,  YouTube, or even LinkedIn, I’ll admit I’m chasing that high  of the all important “like.” The human brain loves “likes” because they activate the same pathways as seeing money hit your bank on pay day and hearing a compliment from a friend.

It feels good to get people’s tiny digital hearts, or thumbs up…or whatever they use on LinkedIn. But likes aren’t a one way street. It turns out when you give  someone else’s post a like, that also activates some of the same brain bits.

This is according to a study published in 2018, which featured 58 young people  getting their brains scanned by an MRI machine while they participated in  a social media experiment. To help control this experiment, the researchers designed a sort  of fake version of Instagram for the participants to use. While inside the MRI, participants scrolled and liked photos at will.

Then after they got out, they  rated the photos they had just seen on a 7-point scale. Once the researchers did all their fancy stats, they were able to show that if you  take an MRI image of someone’s brain… and know that someone is looking  at a picture on fake Instagram… urately predict how much they  actually like that picture. So there’s some defined neural activity  associated with liking Instagram photos.

And this activity is similar to  what we know happens in your brain when you engage in other rewarding behaviors, like accomplishing a goal or  eating your favorite snack. But social media can have more power  than merely tickling your reward centers. The way you engage with it can also  change your brain’s reward pathways in addictive ways.

It’s called Social Networking Site addiction, and it involves dependence,  withdrawal, relapse, tolerance, and other addictive responses. People who are addicted to social  media obsessively use these sites to the point that it gets in the  way of the rest of their lives. It has a lot in common with other addictions, although you might not have heard of it, in part because not all experts agree it’s a thing.

But a solid portion of them use this terminology, and some experts even say up to 10.9% of  the world’s population has this addiction. Pretty much any addiction…be it alcohol,  opioids, gambling, or social media… has a similar appearance in your brain. Especially in your amygdala, which  regulates emotions, impulses, and your expectations of reward.

But according to a paper published in 2017, people with social networking site addictions actually have less grey matter in their amygdalas, meaning there aren’t as many  neurons controlling those processes. However, it’s worth noting this conclusion came from a very small MRI  study of 20 people aged 18-23. The authors of that study  even hinted that someone else should really come along and replicate  their results with a larger sample size.

But their initial results do suggest the  more addictive symptoms a person has, the more they use sites like Facebook. Which honestly isn’t all that surprising, but unsurprising science  needs to get published, too. Also, their work suggests if  you’re in that high use group, your brain might process rewards  differently from your peers’.

And this has been confirmed by at least one other study  with a much larger population. In a longitudinal study published in 2023, 169 middle schoolers participated in a  three-year-long social feedback experiment. So technically, not all of them were  still middle schoolers by the end of it...

In addition to annual brain scans, these students were also asked how  much time they spent on social media. And sure, self-reporting is less reliable than if an app were installed on the  kids’ phones to actually gather that data. But for the purposes of this study, the researchers didn’t need  their every move tracked.

A general concept of their  social media use was enough. Just under half of the students said they  used social media “almost constantly.” And seventy-eight percent of them  reported checking at least every hour. When researchers compared the brains of students who used social media less frequently  against students who used it a lot, they could see differences in  the regions that help anticipate and respond to social rewards,  control cognition, and more.

The results of this study could mean  if you habitually check social media, your brain might look different  from that of someone who doesn’t. But even if that’s true, it doesn’t automatically mean Instagram  is actually changing your brain. It could simply be hacking your brain by taking advantage of the way  you already engage with rewards.

It’s a classic chicken or egg  situation that associations in studies like these can’t parse out. But experts generally agree  that social media is addictive, and high use is associated  with altered reward processing. Speaking of rewards, you may think checking your notifications nonstop and scrolling and liking and  liking and scrolling all day doesn’t even feel rewarding.

And that might be because social media may, in fact, promote negative  interactions instead of positive ones. But before I tell you about the data that  brought us to that conclusion, here’s an ad. Thank you to our Patreon supporters!

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In a study published in 2025, a group of 30 young adults were asked to quickly choose to either  avoid reading a negative comment or read a positive comment on  a series of “Instagram” photos. It was a similarly deceptive  study to the first study, where people thought strangers were  commenting on their own photos,

The participants were just either looking at or avoiding comments that they were told ahead of time  would be either positive or negative. And while they did that, researchers measured how their brain reward centers responded.

The study concluded that we get more reward from receiving a comment about us… even if it’s a negative comment… than we get from no comment at all. Which means we’re not gonna try to  avoid negative interactions online. Note that in neuroscience spaces, a “reward” doesn’t have to include any good feelings.

Just something that makes your  brain want to come back for more. I probably don’t need to tell you this, but that’s not exactly great for  the whole mental health thing. And it’s a great reason to have  people overseeing these platforms so we don’t end up spiraling  into a doom scroll every hour.

But, yeah, about that… The algorithms are also hacking your brain, whether or not you include  the bots and corporations trying to manipulate your social media experience. Algorithms do have a purpose, of course. They show us a sample of the  impossible-to-keep-up-with deluge of social media posts.

But unfortunately, algorithms also use our existing  biases to keep us engaged, which can spread misinformation and conflict. which I'm sure you've never seen any of, on the internet. Compared to the algorithms behind, say, boring ol’ search engines, social media algorithms are biased more  toward stuff you already agree with, that deliver award to you and the stuff that everyone else is engaging with. But the problem isn’t just what we’re seeing.

It’s also what we’re spreading. When we get a ton of one kind  of information in our feeds, we predictably end up making  our own posts and comments about that information. And it spreads and spreads and spreads.

A 2024 paper looking at both Facebook and Twitter… because the data were collected before X happened… found that outrageous headlines are more likely to be shared without  the article being read first. So sometimes, whatever you’re sharing is  legit, and sometimes it’s misinformation. But you won’t know which, because  you didn’t bother to check.

And, as of the filming of this video, the threat of spreading misinformation  is particularly dangerous because we’re still not perfect at  distinguishing reality from stuff like deepfakes. Deepfakes refer to videos that  are manipulated to make it look like someone said something they didn’t, or a person who wasn’t there was, undermining what used to be a  gold standard of real versus fake. In a paper published back in 2021, when about 15,000 participants  looked at a selection of deepfake videos and real ones, they could accurately identify  deepfakes 57% of the time and real videos 75% of the time.

You can probably guess, It’s gotten harder since then In addition, the more videos participants saw, the more likely they were to  think the next one was a deepfake. In other words, while they did technically  get better at identifying deepfakes, they also got worse at identifying real videos. And when you can’t trust what  you see with your own eyes, the concept of brain hacking  feels a little more real.

Now, I’ve covered a lot of ways social  media is hacking your brain in this video. But, according to our analytics,  you’re probably an adult. And social media is influencing someone  even more than you: adolescents.

According to a 2024 paper that looked at MRI data from  adolescents and adults up to age 24, likes activate the emotion center of your brain. But while the adults ended the experiment in a more positive mood than where they started, the adolescents ended in a worse mood. The researchers propose  this is because adolescents react more strongly than adults to the variation  in likes across posts, which includes feeling more bummed  when a post gets fewer likes.

Meanwhile, a different fMRI study  found that compared to adults, adolescents are more likely to like a  photo that already has a lot of likes, even if it’s a photo of a stranger, and even if they’re engaging in risky behaviors like drinking and smoking. When these participants looked at a neutral photo, the visual center of their brain was active.  I mean, they were looking at something, so that’s not very surprising. But when they looked at a photo of  risky behavior with a bunch of likes, there was significantly more activity in  a part of the brain known for imitation… as well as a lot less activation  of impulse control centers.

Now, these researchers didn’t check to see if the participants actually changed their  behavior after scrolling through the photos. So we definitely can’t say that looking at a bunch of pictures of people drinking  alcohol makes your kid start drinking alcohol. But the way their brains  responded isn’t necessarily what a concerned guardian would hope for.

At the end of the day, it is social media. And your experience on these platforms  really is influenced by your peers, even if it’s just “Someone I  follow started posting about   a new show they’re obsessed with on Tumblr, now I have to go illegally stream the pilot.” It’s probably no surprise that adolescents are particularly vulnerable to this effect. But we don’t have to let it  continue this way forever.

One proposed solution is  to redesign the algorithms to suppress biased topics  rather than promote them. Or just put you in control of your own feed. Something as simple as increasing transparency  around the mysterious algorithm could help, too, such as an explanation for why a  certain post was promoted in your feed.

But that’s not really stuff  that you have control over. Researchers also suggest that if you’ve  got a youth or 30 under your care, you could set up a peer-led  support group for social media use, introduce media and tech literacy  classes into your curriculum, and foster non-media based social interactions. It takes a lot of work to  get through any addiction.

But with helpful community and resources, you may be able to use sites like  Instagram in a more positive way. And since you’re not on Instagram right now, go ahead and like this video! Because that will make me feel good [ OUTRO ]