Thank you for reading my work
Public criticism and commentary is a critical part of science. When done well, critical commentary can improve existing work, refocus attention from flawed work, inspire new research questions, and advance theory. Commentary extends peer review, and because I always appreciate anyone taking the time to reflect on my work, I was delighted to learn that a commentary of my work was uploaded to PsyArXiv, and later appeared in Clinical Psychological Science (Sigaud et al. 2026).
The commentary is titled “Why three studies by Vuorre and Przybylski should not be used to assess the impact of social media on adolescent mental health”. I’d expect the commentary then to show that a. our papers intended but failed to examine “the impact of social media on adolescent mental health”, and b. that our papers are indeed used in this manner (and perhaps that we’re responsible—why else would you write about our papers rather than the documents citing them?). We’ve addressed a. at length (Przybylski and Vuorre 2025; Vuorre and Przybylski 2026), so here briefly discuss b.
The claim is specifically about how our works are “often cited as evidence that social media is not harmful to adolescents”. Though I agree that scientists have responsibility over how their works are interepreted—writing must be clear, limitations clearly acknowledged, etc.—it is odd to criticize our work over how others use it, especially when the authors included only two citations to show that this has indeed happened: The first is from a review of a popular self-help book, where the only reference to our work is after “An analysis done in 72 countries shows no consistent or measurable associations between well-being and the roll-out of social media globally” (Odgers 2024). This is an accurate description, and doesn’t evidence Sigaud et al. (2026)’s claim. The other is from Oxford’s press release on Vuorre and Przybylski (2024). While this reads like a typical press release and contains the causally suggestive word “harm” throughout, it is not a good example of citing our work as evidence that “social media is not harmful to adolescents”. Since the claim that our work is used in this manner is a critical motivation for the commentary, it is peculiar that Sigaud et al. (2026) only included two examples of this, neither of which contain the suggested claim.
There is also a rather offending claim in Sigaud et al. (2026) that we have inappropriately spun our work in interviews. We address this in Przybylski and Vuorre (2025). In the submitted version of our reply, we conclude that our comments remain “appropriate and accurate in context of best-selling self-help books with subtitles such as ‘How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness’”.
But I want to conclude this on a different note. I wanted to repeat my thanks to Sigaud et al. (2026) for (presumably) reading our work and engaging critically with it. This is something we should perhaps be doing more of—e.g. as open peer reviews.
Appendix
We submitted a reply to the commentary (Przybylski and Vuorre 2025), and though it was initially rejected for being too long (we had a lot to say, naturally, and it is likely the sole reviewer did not read it because their review consisted of two sentences, the second of which was an apology), we’re hopeful that at least our shorter resubmission (Vuorre and Przybylski 2026) will reach the readers of Sigaud et al. (2026).
References
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Citation
@online{vuorre2026,
author = {Vuorre, Matti},
title = {Thank You for Reading My Work},
date = {2026-09-22},
url = {https://vuorre.com/posts/reply-to-sigaud/},
langid = {en}
}