Excessive Social Media Use Leads to Greater Loneliness Among College Students: Study

Researchers suggest that academic institutions should warn college-age students about the risks of excessive social media use and urge them to foster more face-to-face interactions.

Researchers are warning that using social media for more than 16 hours a week can increase a person’s likelihood of experiencing loneliness and depression, especially among vulnerable college-aged young adults.

In a study published in the Journal of American College Health on February 15, researchers indicate that regular social media use greatly increases the likelihood of being lonely, with that risk increasing the more social media is consumed.

Social media addiction has been associated with significant negative health effects, including increased anxiety, depression, suicide risk and persistent feelings of loneliness.

Researchers say these risks may be amplified by platform features designed to maximize engagement, including algorithm-driven feeds, autoplay functions and continuous scrolling. Mental health experts warn that adolescents are particularly susceptible to compulsive use patterns, as their developing brains are more responsive to social validation and reward-based stimuli.

These findings come as a number of social media addiction lawsuits continue to move forward in courts across the United States, each raising similar allegations that platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube intentionally design algorithms to maximize engagement, particularly among children, who experts say are more vulnerable to addiction and related mental health problems.

For the new study, researchers from the University of Cincinnati School of Human Services studied nearly 65,000 undergraduate college students aged 18 to 24 years old from more than 120 colleges across the U.S., analyzing how many hours per week students used any social media.

Led by Dr. Madelyn J. Hill, the team then looked at data from the American College Health Association’s National College Health Assessment to determine loneliness, which was measured using surveys that asked how often the students felt left out, lacked companionship or felt isolated.

The data indicated 13% of students reported using social media platforms for more than 16 hours per week, which is considered excessive. That averages to a little more than two hours per day. The more social media they consumed, the higher their odds of feeling lonely.

When compared with students who did not use social media at all, those who used it for:

• 16 to 20 hours per week were 19% more likely to feel lonely
• 21 to 25 hours per week were 23% more likely to feel lonely
• 26 to 30 hours per week were 34% more likely to feel lonely
• 30 or more hours per week were 38% more likely to feel lonely

More than half of all students, 54% overall, reported being lonely. Women and Black students reported feelings of loneliness more than other groups. However, students doing hybrid courses were less lonely than those doing in-person classes. Researchers said this is likely because they were still able to see their old friends and maintain established relationships. Those who lived at home were lonelier than those who lived on campus.

Students who belonged to fraternities and sororities were among the least likely to be lonely. This may be because they have more opportunities to socialize with other students, the team suggested.

Researchers determined that excessive social media use can decrease the amount of time a person spends socializing face-to-face, warning that feeling lonely can increase the risk of depression and early death, and that widespread social media use may be replacing meaningful interactions which protect mental health. They called for strategies to help strengthen supportive relationships, recommending that academic institutions educate students on the effects of social media use and encourage them to set time limits.

Social Media Addiction Lawsuits

As research continues to highlight the risks associated with excessive social media use, a growing number of social media addiction lawsuits have been filed against platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube. 

The complaints allege that addictive algorithms designed to maximize user engagement have contributed to serious mental health problems among children and young adults, including loneliness, depression, eating disorders, suicide attempts and completed suicides.

Social media platforms currently face more than 2,300 lawsuits pending in the Northern District of California before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, where the court has been presiding over coordinated discovery and pretrial proceedings over the past few years. The first two federal social media addiction bellwether cases are scheduled to go to trial in the summer of 2026.

However, the first state social media trial is already underway in California court involving claims by a woman identified as K.G.M., who alleges that TikTok, Meta, Snap and Google knowingly designed their platforms in ways that encouraged compulsive use and failed to protect young users from foreseeable mental health harms.

Although an independent state court case, the trial represents the first time a jury will evaluate claims that social media platform design and recommendation systems contributed to addiction-related mental health injuries.

While the outcomes of these early bellwether trials will not have any binding impact on other claims, they may help determine how much the platforms end up paying in social media addiction settlements to resolve the litigation.

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