International evidence on happiness and social media

John F. Helliwell, Lara B. Aknin, Haifang Huang, Mariano Rojas, Shun Wang, Vicente Guerra and Adam Danyluk

Abstract

Each year, Chapter 2 has two roles: first, to present and explain the latest global happiness rankings, and second, to present research on the current year’s topic. Often these two roles are closely linked, since the report’s focal topic may invite a range of alternative rankings. For example, we ranked the happiness of the native-born and the foreign-born when our topic was immigration in WHR 2018, and we ranked the happiness gaps between the more and less happy parts of the population when our focus was happiness inequality in WHR 2023.

In WHR 2024, we focused on happiness across age groups and generations. We return to that topic this year, with a special focus on the links between social media use and youth wellbeing around the world. We find striking differences in how the young have fared. In 85 of 136 countries, the under-25s are happier now (2023–2025) than they were twenty years ago (2006–2010). By contrast, in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, life evaluations for under-25s have fallen by an average of 0.86 points on the 0 to 10 scale. Why has youth happiness dropped so fast and so far in those countries?

An invited chapter in WHR 2019 used US evidence to attribute the drops in youth happiness to increased use of digital media. We wondered if the timing and nature of social media use might help to explain the striking variations in youth happiness in different parts of the world, so we gathered an international team of expert authors whose contributions are in the seven chapters following this one.

To keep our own analysis consistent with that in other chapters, we consider three age categories: 15–19, 20–24, and 25 or older. We also consider the following generational splits: those born in or after 1997 (Gen Z), those born 1981–1996 (Millennials), and all those born earlier (Gen X and preceding generations). The Gallup World Poll data start at age 15, as is common with most population-based surveys, so we also analysed student data from the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey, which covers a sample of 15-year-olds in 47 countries.

We present the global rankings first, then proceed to our new research on social media.

The World Happiness Report is published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, in partnership with Gallup, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and an independent editorial board.

Any views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect the views of any organisation, agency, or program of the United Nations.