Disrupting Social Media Habits — a Field Experiment with Young Danish Consumers

The Danish Competition and Consumer Authority has conducted a behavioral field experiment involving 269 young people aged 13 to 17. Over the course of the six-week experiment, participants interacted with social media more than 1.2 million times.

The findings show that young people significantly altered their social media behavior when small interventions were introduced during their usage sessions.

Before the experiment, participants spent an average of 3 hours and 19 minutes per day on social media. The interventions, applied during every session, led to an average reduction in daily social media activity of 31–36 percent. The greatest effect was observed among those with the highest baseline social media activity, as well as among individuals with low self-control and high social media addiction.

One of the interventions involved a six-second waiting period, accompanied by a calming animation, before an app opened. This intervention resulted in a reduction of more than one-third in daily social media activity. For a participant with an average daily usage of three hours, this translates to freeing up more than one hour per day for other activities.

Many participants chose to dismiss the social media app altogether when confronted with an intervention. Overall, the interventions led to app dismissals in 13–28 percent of app opening attempts.

This is the first experiment in Denmark to quantify young people’s social media use by hour, based on their actual activity.

Before the experiment, participants in primary education (grundskolen) spent 11 percent of their school time on social media, while the corresponding figure for students in secondary education (e.g., gymnasiums) was 21 percent. Social media use during school hours—defined as weekdays between 08:00 and 14:00—was therefore notably high.

The interventions halved the number of social media sessions during school hours and reduced total social media activity during this period by 40 percent. In the evening, participants reduced their social media activity by about 38 percent, gaining up to 16 extra minutes for sleep.

Notably, the young people’s overall satisfaction with social media remained unaffected by the interventions, indicating that the effects were achieved without compromising their experience.

Read the Technical Appendix of the analysis "Disrupting Social Media Habits" (pdf)

The analysis is a follow-up to the report Young Consumers and Social Media, published by the Danish Competition and Consumer Authority in February 2025.