Imagine a tribe of uncontacted hunter-gatherers in the deepest Amazon rainforest. Anthropologists airdrop dozens of smartphones loaded with social media apps, with solar chargers, simple instructions in their native language and Wi-Fi just within the tribe. What would happen to their culture and their mental health?

Such an experiment appears fanciful, but a similar one has been unfolding in our world for about 20 years. For the first time in human evolution, everyday social interactions have changed from face-to-face to disembodied experiences, from in-person to digital and from social reality to whatever someone puts online.

Social media is an evolutionary novelty, like M&M’s, e-cigarettes, fentanyl and H-bombs. Each comes with novel risks to health and well-being to which humans are entirely unaccustomed.

What, then, are the risks of seemingly innocuous behaviours such as sharing posts, giving likes, making oneself look good in pictures, and, in general, interacting virtually rather than physically? The short answer is that we don’t know — yet — especially because our big experiment has no control group.

But we can try to find out.

We recently investigated the question of what mental disorders are associated with high social media use. To do so, we conducted a systematic review — an objective way to find and evaluate all of the relevant literature. We hypothesized that social media use should be higher among people whose psychology, and........

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