Social media use is ubiquitous in our modern society, and some individuals display excessive, maladaptive use of these online platforms. This problematic social media use (PSMU) has been associated with greater impulsivity and risk-taking. Importantly, studies in healthy individuals have demonstrated that greater cognitive impulsivity is associated with a greater susceptibility to online “fake news.” Therefore, we hypothesized that PSMU would be associated with believing in and engaging with fake news. To address this, we conducted an online, within-subject experiment in which participants (N=189; female=102, male=86, prefer not to disclose=1; mean age=19.8 years) completed a fake news task. This task presented participants with 20 news stories (10 real and 10 false, in random order) formatted as social media posts. We assessed participants’ credibility judgments of these news posts, as well as participants’ intentions to click, like, comment, and share these posts. We also assessed participants’ degree of PSMU and then related this measure to their performance in our task. We conducted a repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) with a mixed model approach, and it revealed that the greater one’s PSMU, the more one finds specifically false news credible. We also found that the greater one’s PSMU, the greater one’s engagement with news posts, agnostic to the type of content (real or false). Finally, we found that the greater one’s PSMU, the greater one’s intent to click on specifically false news. Our research demonstrates that individuals who experience the most distress and impairment in daily functioning from social media use are also the most susceptible to false information posted on social media. We discuss the clinical implications of our findings.

Citation: Meshi D, Molina MD (2025) Problematic social media use is associated with believing in and engaging with fake news. PLoS ONE 20: e0321361. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.

Editor: Stefano Cresci„ National Research Council (CNR), ITALY

Until now, only expensive and slow electron microscopes could reach this level of detail. But LICONN opens the door for more labs around the world to explore the brain’s cellular “wiring diagram” using tools they already have. It’s like giving everyone a high-powered zoom lens for decoding how the brain works, learns, and perhaps breaks down in disease.

In collaboration with the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), we published in Nature the first-ever method for using light microscopy to comprehensively map all the neurons and their connections in a block of brain tissue. The key finding from this validation experiment is that this approach works as well as electron microscopy-based connectomics.

Our brain is a complex organ. Billions of nerve cells are wired in an intricate network, constantly processing signals, enabling us to recall memories or to move our bodies.

Making sense of this complicated network requires a precise look into how these nerve cells are arranged and connected. “LICONN,” a new microscopy method developed by scientists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) and Google Research, now helps piece together this puzzle.

Light microscopes have been evolving for centuries. Scientists use light microscopy to—literally and figuratively—illuminate the most intricate biological structures. However, unraveling the complex details and architecture of the brain remains a seemingly impossible challenge, considering its billions of densely packed neurons, each linked to other cells via thousands of synapses.