Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the witness stand last week in Los Angeles County Superior Court to defend his company from accusations that social media harms children.

A lawsuit filed by a 20-year-old plaintiff alleges Instagram and other social media apps are designed to make young users addicted to their platforms.

Meanwhile, social media experts believe the algorithms that drive content on these platforms play a role in hooking users and keeping them scrolling for extensive periods of time.

A new study led by Georgia Tech might confirm this suspicion.

Using recently acquired data from more than 10,000 adolescent users, Munmun De Choudhury will audit TikTok’s recommendation algorithm and study its impact on young people’s behavior and mental health.

De Choudhury is leading a multi-institutional research team on a four-year, $1.7 million grant from the Huo Family Foundation.

“We hope to learn the different types of negative exposures that young people experience when using TikTok,” De Choudhury said. “This can help us characterize what they’re watching and build computational methods to understand the consumption behaviors of these participants and how they’re affected by the algorithm.”

De Choudhury, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing, is collaborating with Amy Orben, a professor at the University of Cambridge, and Homa Hosseinmardi, an assistant professor at UCLA, on the project.

Social media platforms have become increasingly reluctant to share their data in recent years, posing a challenge for researchers like De Choudhury.

“We can’t do the type of studies we did 10 years ago with X (formerly Twitter) because the API is much more restrictive,” she said. “There are limited ways to programmatically access people’s data now.

“We must go through a tedious, manual process to get around declining access to social media data. This data-gathering process is essential given the sensitive nature of mental health research. You want data that is shared with consent.”

Orben collected TikTok data from more than 10,000 young people in the UK who consented to provide their personal data archives in accordance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The collected data includes watch histories, which De Choudhury said distinguishes this research from other social media studies that focus on what users post.

“We don’t understand passive social media consumption very well, so we hope to close that gap and learn what that looks like,” she said. “That could complement or contrast what we know about people’s active engagement on these platforms. Is what they’re consuming directly related to what they’re posting? How does passive consumption affect young people’s mental health?”

A clearer picture of how algorithm-based content affects young people could result in design interventions to minimize negative effects. De Choudhury said studying data from young people is critical because it’s not too late to steer them away from unhealthy behavioral patterns.

“Some of the earliest signs or symptoms of mental health conditions appear in adolescence,” she said. “If appropriate care and support are provided, maybe it’s possible to prevent these symptoms from becoming full-blown in the future.”

Beyond TikTok

What the research team learns about TikTok could also provide broader insight into other social media platforms.

TikTok has been influential in how social media platforms display video content. Competitors like Instagram and X modeled their video presentation after TikTok’s, which can easily lead to doomscrolling.

“Our hope is that our findings can be generalized, with the caveat the data we have is exclusively from TikTok,” De Choudhury said. “Other platforms have similar video-sharing and consumption features where the video automatically plays from one to the next. We hope what we learn from TikTok will be applicable to people’s activities elsewhere, though it will require future work beyond this project to draw concrete conclusions.”

Simulating Feeds with AI

De Choudhury said an additional part of the study will be using artificial intelligence (AI) to simulate video feeds.

In 2024, Hosseinmardi led a study at the University of Pennsylvania on YouTube’s recommendation algorithm and used bots that either followed or ignored the recommendations.

De Choudhury said they will use a similar method for TikTok.

“The feeds will be realistic but generated by AI to see the potential pathways to consumption rabbit holes,” she said. “This should give us some insight into how algorithms influence the negative and positive exposures people might be having on TikTok.”

Foundation Expands Reach

Based in the UK and established in 2009, the Huo Family Foundation supports community education initiatives in the UK, the U.S., and China.

The organization announced in January its launch of the Huo Family Foundation Science Programme. The new program is committing $17.6 million to fund 20 new multi-year research grants that explore the impact of digital technology on the brain development, social behavior, and mental health of young people.

“Digital technology is profoundly shaping childhood and young adulthood, yet there is limited causal evidence of its effects,” said Yan Huo, founder of the Huo Family Foundation, in a press release. “We are proud to support exceptional researchers advancing vital scientific understanding.”