(CNN) – A new study suggests health warning labels placed inside social media apps could make teenagers and young adults think twice before using them — but researchers say the findings stop short of proving the warnings actually change behavior.
Researchers recruited more than 1,000 people between the ages of 13 and 29 — roughly half teenagers and half young adults — and showed them 15 different warning messages displayed on a mock Instagram page.
What the warnings said
The messages covered a range of potential harms, including:
Depression and anxiety
Negative body image
Sleep disruption
Addiction
Overall mental health harms
The study also included a neutral control message and one suggesting a voluntary social media break.
Participants rated how much each message discouraged them from wanting to use social media and how much it increased their awareness of potential harms.
“All of the messages — the health harm messages — were rated more likely to discourage their social media use and increase their awareness of the harms,” said Dr. Thomas Robinson, the Irving Schulman, MD Endowed Professor in Child Health and Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine at Stanford University.
Mental health warnings performed strongest
The warnings that focused specifically on mental health harms — including depression and anxiety — generated the strongest response among participants.
Researchers also found the health-focused warnings generally outperformed a simple screen-time-break message, the kind some platforms already use voluntarily.
A critical limitation
The study measured what participants said the warnings would motivate them to do — not what they actually did.
“We believe that these results suggest that we would see meaningful change,” Robinson said. “However, we haven’t tested that yet, and that’s the next step — to actually test it, because we need to then test in a real-world setting what happens when these messages are displayed when you open your social media.”
Researchers say real-world testing is the next phase of the work.
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