Social Media Toxicity and Mental Health

George Beknazar-Yuzbashev, Francesco Capozza, Kylan Rutherford and Mateusz Stalinski
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George Beknazar-Yuzbashev: University of Chicago, The Normal Lab
Francesco Capozza: UB, IEB, and CESifo
Kylan Rutherford: New York University
Mateusz Stalinski: University of Warwick and CAGE,

CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)

Abstract: We study whether content-level moderation that reduces exposure to social media toxicity, holding platform access constant, affects mental health. We deploy, for randomly assigned users, a cross-platform browser extension that hides posts and comments exceeding a prespecified toxicity threshold, and follow N = 664 desktop users over a six-week intervention across two waves-one during the 2024 U.S. election campaign and one outside of it. Contrary to basic intuition, filtering toxicity worsens mental health: treatment raises a standardized index of GAD-7 and PHQ-8 symptoms by 0.15σ, and the share of respondents above a moderate-symptom screening cutoff rises by about 12 pp. A QALY-based calibration implies a welfare cost of about $158 per treated participant. Heightened loneliness and a diminished relative moral self-view emerge as potential channels. We conclude that curbing toxic content can impose unintended psychological costs, even where it yields other social benefits.

Keywords: mental health; toxic content; hate speech; moderation; social media; field experiment JEL Classification: C93; D83; I10; I31; L82; L86; Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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