Colorado teen conducts survey exposing social media's negative impacts on mental health
Author: Fox And Friends | Published on: March 29, 2026
High school junior Hallie Zilberman discusses a survey exposing the negative mental health outcomes associated with teen social media usage.
When Hallie Zilberman noticed the mental health struggles around her, she didn't wait for a study to confirm what she was seeing. The Colorado high school junior designed her own survey, reached over 1,000 teenage girls across the United States, and analyzed the results herself — all at 17 years old.
Her findings pointed to social media as a recurring factor across nearly every negative mental health outcome she tracked, including anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. One result that stood out: 52% of respondents reported not getting the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep per night, with late-night scrolling identified as a key contributor.
Body image also emerged as a significant thread in the data. Hallie noted that struggles with body image appeared tied to almost every mental health outcome in her results, cutting across multiple categories in ways that were difficult to ignore.
The findings were personal enough that Hallie made a direct change in her own life: she deleted her Snapchat and Instagram accounts. "I decided I can have agency with my own life," she said during a Fox & Friends interview. "I can do what I can do and make my own life better."
Her research comes amid growing legal scrutiny of social media platforms, following a landmark Colorado trial in which Meta and Google were found liable for making their platforms addictive to young users. Hallie's grassroots survey adds a student-led perspective to a conversation that's increasingly being taken up in courtrooms and legislatures — one data point at a time.
Originally Published on Fox News on March 29, 2026
