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When we talk about social media in 2024, we focus on kids and teens, because they seem the most vulnerable to the negative effects, but a new study asks a new question, not about kids, but about adults: is there a relationship between social media use and irritability?

The study, “Irritability and Social Media Use in US Adults” published in early 2024 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), poses this research question:

Is social media use by adults associated with irritability, or being prone to anger?

To explore this question, the research team recruited close to 50,000 adult participants with the following characteristics:

  • Average age: 46
  • Gender: 58.5% women / 40.4% men / 1.1% nonbinary
  • Race/ethnicity: 2.9% Asian / 13.9% Black / 12.5% Hispanic / 1.5% Native American / 1.2% Pacific Islander / 66.6% White / 1.5% Other

To determine levels of social media use, the researchers asked the following question:

“Do you ever use any of the following social media sites or apps?”

The apps in question were Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. Follow-up questions to “yes” answers focused first on frequency of use:

  • Less than once a week
  • Around once a week
  • More than once a week
  • Around once a day
  • Many times a day
  • All day

In addition, researchers collected data on frequency of posting:

  • Never
  • Less than once a month
  • Around once a month
  • Around once a week
  • Every day
  • Many times per day

And for the influence of two factors:

  • Presence of anxiety or depression
  • Level of political engagement

Finally, to measure levels of irritability/anger, participants completed the Brief Irritability Test (BITe5), which asks people to rate the following statements on a scale of 1-6, where “1” means never and “6” means always. Higer overall scores indicate higher levels of irritability:

I have been grumpy, I have been feeling like I might snap, Other people have been getting on my nerves, Things have been bothering me more than they normally do, I have been feeling irritable.

We’ll share the results in a moment. First, we’ll look at the overall data on social media use in the U.S.

How Many Adults Use Social Media, Why Adults Use Social Media

Polling experts at Pew Research measured Americans’ Social Media Use in 2024, and found the following patterns of use among adults ag 18+:

  • Facebook: 68%
  • Instagram: 47%
  • TikTok: 33%
  • Twitter: 22%

In addition, an earlier poll conducted by Pew Research identifies the primary reasons adults 18+ use social media:

  • Staying in touch with current friends: 67%
  • Staying in touch with family: 64%
  • Reconnecting with old friends: 50%
  • Making new friends: 9%
  • Dating: 3%

Let’s look at one more set of data: use of social media as a news source. This poll, also by Pew Research, found the following percentages of adults use these platforms as a primary source of news:

  • Facebook: 48%
  • Instagram: 40%
  • TikTok: 52%
  • Twitter: 59%

To put those numbers in perspective, the latest U.S. Census counted 258.3 million people over age 18 living in the U.S. Therefore, we can say that – picking two data points from above for example – roughly 200 million adults in the U.S. use Facebook, and roughly 154 million adults in the U.S. use Twitter as a primary source of news.

Now it’s time to look at that study, and learn whether social media increases irritability and anger among those millions of adult users.

Social Media Use and Irritability: The Results

First, let’s look at the overall data on social media use among the 50,000 adults in the study.

Social media use:

  • 2% said they use at least one social media platform

Frequency of use:

  • Once a day: 14.2%
  • Multiple times a day: 39.2%
  • All day: 24.9%

Posting frequency:

  • Weekly: 18.4%
  • Daily: 13.7%
  • Multiple times per day: 16.2%

After analyzing BITe scores on irritability, the research team found that frequent use of social media was associated with significantly greater irritability:

  • Multiple times a day social media use was associated with an irritability score 1.43 points higher than no social media use
  • Most of the day social media use was associated with an irritability score 3.37 points higher than no social media use

For use most of the day, significant increases in irritability varied by platform:

  • Twitter: increase of 0.67 points
  • TikTok: increase of 1.69 points
  • Instagram: increase of 0.69 points
  • Facebook: increase of 1.40 points

Additional notable results:

The research team found modest increases in irritability for more than once a day users of Facebook and TikTok, but not Facebook and Instagram. After adjusting the results for the presence of anxiety or depression, increases in irritability were modest, but still significant. Adjusting the results for engagement in politics/political posts had no effect on levels of irritability among adults.

A quick explainer on adjusting:

What that means is, statistically speaking, the researchers remove participants with whatever they’re adjusting for from the overall results, in order to learn whether those things impacted the primary measure of the study. In this case, controlling for involved removing – with a statistical formula – people with anxiety and/or depression, and people with a high level of political engagement from the final results.

The Consequences of Irritability and Anger

When we think about the consequences of irritability and anger, we often focus on its impact on others, rather than on the individual who’s irritated or angry. We understand that someone who’s generally angry or irritable is no fun to be around. When we do think about the experience of the angry person, we often have thoughts like these:

It must take a lot of energy to be so angry at everything and everyone.
That doesn’t seem like a nice way to live.
I wonder what’s going on with them, that they’re so angry all the time.

Let’s focus on that last statement, since there’s not judgment implied. Yes, grumpy, angry, irritable people are no fun to be around. However, in some cases, the presence of a mental health disorder can explain the presence of anger and irritability, since anger and irritability are recognized as symptoms of:

Research shows that when anger/irritability occurs alongside depression and/or other mental health disorders, it can lead to:

That information drives home the point that anger and irritability have significant negative consequences for individuals with a mental health disorder: it can increase the severity of symptoms, impair treatment progress, and disrupt typical daily function.

Therefore, we can use this information when screening patients for mental health disorders. If anger and irritability are primary symptoms, we now know that one possible factor at play may be their use of social media.