Amid growing chatter about a Gen Z loneliness epidemic and the continued rollout of under-16s social media bans, a new study has found social media use is directly linked to lower happiness levels among young people in Australia and New Zealand.
The results were revealed today within the World Happiness Report for 2026, which offers an annual look into the state of happiness across the world and is published by the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre.
The World Happiness Report works by surveying people from more than 140 countries and asking them about happiness indicators like their level of freedom, their ability for economic growth, and their physical and mental health.
This year, the report found that life evaluations — that is, the overall measure of a person’s satisfaction with their life — have dropped dramatically among people aged 25 and under in Australia and New Zealand, as well as Canada and the US.
The report indicated that this drop is closely associated with heavy social media use, with under-25-year-old respondents who used social platforms for just one hour a day found to be the happiest in the world.
Meanwhile, those who used social media for longer than an hour per day reported lower life evaluations.
“Gen Z has heavy social media use, and with it comes increasing stress levels, and when stress levels go up life satisfaction goes down,” Stephanie Rossouw, an author of the report explained.
Interestingly, under-25-year-olds in countries like Australia and New Zealand reported lower happiness levels despite them using social media at a similar rate to non-English speaking countries.
As for which platforms are the least conducive to happiness, the report suggested sites driven by algorithmically curated content tend to have a negative association with wellbeing.
That means TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube, or really any other platform that has content catered specifically to your interests (which is most of them).
On the other end of the spectrum, platforms designed to facilitate social connections show a clear positive association with happiness, suggesting it’s not all doom and gloom out there on the interwebs.
The report said the link between social media and happiness is subject to “considerable variation” in terms of contextual details and scientific interpretations, but it nonetheless outlined the connection between life evaluations and being chronically online.
It also mentioned the Australian government’s under-16s social media ban, saying the findings create a “complex global picture” about young people’s happiness at a time when other countries, like France and Spain, are looking into their version of the ban.
Overall, the report showed a drop for Australia more broadly, with the country falling from 11th to 15th place in the world happiness rankings. Finland, meanwhile, has maintained its 1st place ranking for the 11th year in a row, with nations in or near conflict zones placing towards the bottom.
The second phase of Australia’s under-16s social media restrictions began earlier this month when scores of Aussies were blocked out of websites like PornHub until they proved their age.
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