It's been a great @sllshome.bsky.social #SLLS2025! On Tuesday I presented the initial results of our study on social media use and psychiatric diagnoses in adolescents in England. You can read the preprint here: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

🚨 Last chance to apply! We're looking for a new Director. Find out more about the role and apply on the CLS website, closing date TOMORROW: bit.ly/452oe4v

We have a ✨NEW PREPRINT✨! Using data from the @clscohorts.bsky.social Millennium Cohort Study and linked healthcare records, we tested the association between social media use and psychiatric diagnoses in secondary care in young people in England. This is still a work in progress - feedback welcome!

If you're interested in learning #JuliaLang and are currently an #RStats user (or even if you're not!), then here's a little introduction to getting started! 📊 Blog post: nrennie.rbind.io/blog/introdu... #QuartoPub #Julia @tidierjl.bsky.social

"[The Online Safety Act] requires victims of sexual assault to submit government IDs to access support communities. People struggling with addiction must undergo facial recognition scans to find help quitting drinking or smoking."

Wrote about how the UK's online age verification requirements are already proving to be a disaster (as UK regulators were clearly warned it would be) and how unhelpful the UK's response to this mess has been, including their tech minister saying anyone who complains supports predators.

Didn’t Take Long To Reveal The UK’s Online Safety Act Is Exactly The Privacy-Crushing Failure Everyone Warned About Well, well, well. The “age assurance” part of the UK's Online Safety Act has finally gone into effect, with its age checking requirements kicking in a week and a half ago. And what…

Today I presented my work on data from the @unicefinnocenti.bsky.social Disrupting Harm survey at #IPC2025 in Brisbane! It was a great opportunity to engage with other researchers interested in investigating youth mental health in the population. Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

We have a ✨NEW PREPRINT✨! Using data from the @clscohorts.bsky.social Millennium Cohort Study and linked healthcare records, we tested the association between social media use and psychiatric diagnoses in secondary care in young people in England. This is still a work in progress - feedback welcome!

Happy to share my new study, publ. in Social Science Research 🎉 Bottom line: Yes, adolescents use their phones a lot 🤳 But I find no support for the notion that this use displaces reading, homework, hobbies, physical act., sleep... Instead: Changing media preferences 📺 ->📱. doi.org/10.1016/j.ss...

Shame on the Guardian for publishing this as if Sullivan is an independent expert. Sullivan is a well-known gender-critical campaigner, & advisor to Sex Matters, a prominent GC campaign group which is reported to be deeply entangled with anti-LGBTQ+ movements: yorkshirebylines.co.uk/news/home-af...

is starting the first conference session at 07:30 part of an experiment to test the effects of lack of sleep on the mental health of psychiatry conference participants?

Had a great first day at #SIPS2025! Don't miss our session tomorrow morning on the challenges of public engagement in a post-truth society 🗯️ (@sarahbakirci.bsky.social @zefreeman.com)

🚨New preprint 🚨 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐡 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐧 𝐒𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐌𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐚 𝐇𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐬: 𝐀 𝐋𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐞-𝐒𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐞 𝐌𝐢𝐜𝐫𝐨-𝐍𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐒𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐲 osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵 Using a novel micro-narrative method, we collected ~ 900 first-person accounts of social media harms from young people across the UK and US.

Today I was in Birmingham for the @popmhuk.bsky.social Innovation Lab in Children and Young People's Mental Health! It was really great to see researchers, practitioners, public institutions, community organisations and young people in one room to connect and identify areas for collaboration 📈🤓

TW: harm to children. My research into the effects of the UK government puberty-blocker ban has finally been published after peer-review. It details the severe harm being caused to young trans people & children by the Starmer government's puberty-blocker ban. Unlike Cass it is peer reviewed...

CLS to lead the UK Age 8 Pilot of Growing Up in Digital Europe @guide-cohort.bsky.social‬, a major European initiative to create internationally-harmonised data for research on child development and wellbeing. Find out more on the CLS website: buff.ly/gI6P3gA

📢 Job opportunity! 📢 I am recruiting a 2-year postdoc to join me at @clscohorts.bsky.social to work on a SUPER exciting project on the quantitative study of intersectional inequalities in youth mental health across time and place! See www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/... for more info and how to apply!

Excited (and a little nervous!) to be giving a talk on 30 June at the Turing’s CIIG seminar series. If you're interested in IPTW/propensity score methods, or in seeing some cat photos 🐾 (with the former obviously being more likely!), everyone’s welcome to join.

It promises to be a very interesting discussion! What can we as scientists do to combat the misinterpretation (wilful and unintentional) of our findings? Come along to our #SIPS2025 unconference to see if we can find some answers 🤓

is it just me?

this {targets} business is getting out of hand (@brodriguesco.bsky.social this is your fault)

In a way, the social media consensus paper has formed a consensus. We all agree we don't like it

Very good article by Amy Orben "we propose that if there is inadequate safety information available about a digital product ... researchers and policymakers should lower the evidence thresholds needed to start testing interventions to address potential harms." www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Just out! Our peer-reviewed critique of the Cass Review has been published by BMC Medical Research Methodology. Please read and share. We show that the Cass Review is fatally flawed and should not be the basis for policy or practice in transgender healthcare. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

stolen from reddit

I’ll have a hard time buying that these tiny “detox” effects are real improvements until we can find a way to rule out experimental demand characteristics. Who signs up for a study where they’ll be asked to shut off Instagram for several weeks? Probably, people who think it’s good for them.

It's never about the science. It's always about having a legal basis for your fear and hatred of other people.

NEW | Analysing a story about an academic and smartphone bans… THE ANATOMY OF A SMEAR Comparing two news stories about an academic's view on school smartphone bans reveals just how easy it is to twist the narrative. brokenbottleboy.substack.com/p/4-the-anat...

A lot of academics signed a letter to The Times in support of Dr Amy Orben, who was attacked as 'biased' last week. In fact, Amy does extremely meticulous and systematic research in the area of social media and adolescent mental health www.thetimes.com/comment/lett...

This weekend, academics from around the world signed a letter to the Times in support of Dr Amy Orben. Let there be no doubt: Amy is one of the best and most honest scientists in the field of digital tech effects. www.thetimes.com/comment/lett...

Like many people I was absolutely appalled by the Times article accusing Dr Amy Orben of bias today. Amy is a paragon of how to conduct robust, open and transparent research. I won’t link to the article b/c it doesn’t deserve the oxygen, but we absolutely need to take the heat out of this debate.

📢 CLS wants your help to shape the content of the next cohort study surveys 📢 ⏱️Submit your ideas by Friday, 16 May 2025 via the links below: 👉 The joint NCDS and BCS70 web survey - buff.ly/mmTudlI 👉 The web survey of parents and carers of MCS participants - buff.ly/6YLBL5t

In Westminster today for #AIUK! This morning we had a great session promoting @harmonydata.bsky.social, an AI tool for harmonising survey data 🥳

✨ Have you booked yet? Join us for our free webinar NEXT WEEK introducing 1970 British Cohort Study data at age 51. Discover more about the experiences of generation X in midlife: cls.ucl.ac.uk/events/bcs70... #BSC70 #ageing

The current crisis in child mental health is a worrying & urgent issue, and it's not going to go away. Meeting needs for relatedness, autonomy & competence seems to me the basic scaffolding for supporting mental health - read more in this blog for Health Foundation www.health.org.uk/features-and...

I wrote a little more about this, i.e. why I'm being so stubborn in recording every deviation as it happens. TL;DR: I want to be as transparent as possible about why and at what stages the plan changed. Getting 3 emails from OSF per update is annoying though 😭 www.tommetherell.com/blog/researc...

Time to reflect on our retreat! In January the students of the UCL-Wellcome PhD programme in Mental Health Science were lucky to be able to get together again to share wisdom, relax and reconnect with each other. We wrote about our experience on our blog: www.mentalhealthscience.org/blogs/ucl-we...

"PREREGISTRATION IS NOT A PRISON" I cry, as I publish version 14 of the preregistration

'Banning children from social media undermines their rights!' #EUKidsOnline published a #statement to explain. Instead... 📌strengthen regulations to ensure safer online environments 📌promote digital literacy 📌encourage evidence-based policies 📌consult children Read: www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-co...

We talk a lot about why adolescent girls report more low mood and anxiety, and why this might be getting worse. But what do girls themselves think might explain this? As you might have guessed, we don’t really know. So, we asked them: doi.org/10.1186/s129... 1/8

New study backs up what a lot of us have been saying for a while now: smartphone bans in school aren't a magic fix for everything we're worrying about. It's time to start seriously thinking about how we build better digital literacy skills: www.theguardian.com/education/20...

So excited to see this in print! A manifesto paving the way for responsible generalisation and co-authorship practices in open science - with an incredible team of scholars! Very much inspired by the benchmark Munafò et al. manifesto for reproducible science www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Refreshing piece by Amy Fleming in The Guardian, where I joined scholars to unpack misconceptions that disempower parents & young people around tech. Evidence doesn’t support fear—our approach shouldn’t either. Let’s pause panic & do better for families in 2025! www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

I wrote about all the ways Jonathan Haidt gets it wrong and how early Haidt would not have been happy with later Haidt. newrepublic.com/article/1903...

Indeed! How do we escape this cycle of silliness? In our paper we propose a constructive way forward. Pivoting from fear-based reactions to a proactive multi-stakeholder framework. Researchers, families, and young people cannot face the burden of being let down by policy and industry again.

New article in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health! We disentangle limitations in research on digital harms in youth to inform recommendations for studying impacts of rapid adoption of Artificial Intelligence. Open link until 11th March: authors.elsevier.com/a/1kTwe8Mut2... 🧵 Summary below 1/12

This from @karenlauram.bsky.social @sakshighai.bsky.social @nballou.bsky.social @matti.vuorre.com @shuhbillskee.bsky.social ++ really hits the nail on the head for me. 👇 www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Our joint statement in response to the ceasefire agreement.

Critical lack of evidence about social media use and youth mental health in clinical populations www.nationalelfservice.net?p=209615 #SocialMedia #YouthMentalHealth #Research