A research team at the University of Oxford are claiming that the effects of social media use on teenage life satisfaction are "tiny", according to the BBC.
The group surveyed 12,000 UK adolescents in order to investigate the impact of social media on wellbeing, and found that friends, family and school life all had a greater impact.
The researchers are also stating that their study is more in-depth and robust than ones which have been previously published.
The study was published in the journal PNAS, and tries to answer the question of whether teens who are using social media sites more than the average adolescent have lower life satisfaction.
The University of Oxford team urged companies to release data on how the public actually uses social media to try to understand the impact of technology on youth in a more detailed manner.
Previous research on screens, technology and youth mental health have contradicted this new study, emphasising the damaging aspects.
Professor Andrew Przybylski and Amy Orben, of the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford, claim the stereotype of negative technology is often based on limited evidence and doesn't reflect reality.
Przybylski and Orben's study concluded that the majority of connections between life satisfaction and social media use were "trivial", accounting for less than one percent of a teen's wellbeing, and social media is "not a one-way street".
Przybylski continued, saying; "99.75% of a person's life satisfaction has nothing to do with their use of social media." The study took place between 2009 and 2017, and asked thousands of 10 to 15-year-olds to elaborate on the length of time spent on sites on a normal day.
Interestingly, the study found more effects of time spent online in girls, but this was miniscule. The researchers said that less than half of these effects were statistically signifiant.
"Parents shouldn't worry about time on social media- thinking about it that way is wrong," Professor Przybylski said. "We are fixated on time- but we need to retire this notion of screen time. The results are not showing evidence for great concern."
The team stated that it's now important to identify youth at greater risk from certain effects of social media, and find other factors that had an impact on their lives.
They plan on meeting social media companies to discuss how they can discover how people actually use apps, rather than time spent on them.
Co-study author and psychology lecturer at University of Oxford, Amy Orben, said the social media industry are obliged to release their usage data and support independent research.
"Access is key to understanding the many roles that social media plays in the lives of young people" she said.
Dr Max Davie, who is employed as the officer for health improvement at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, also called for companies to collaborate with scientists.
Referring to the study as "the first small step", he also stated that there are other issues to explore, such as screen time's interference with exercise, free time and sleep.
