NJ picks Rutgers to lead social media research center

New Jersey officials have tapped Rutgers University to lead a new publicly funded social media research center dedicated to protecting children from its addictive features and other risks online.

Gov. Mikie Sherrill said Monday that Rutgers was selected through a competitive grant process that will provide the state university $500,000 to assess the impact of social media on New Jersey teens, identify specific measures that can be used to mitigate the damage it causes, and promote healthy and responsible use of social media apps.

Findings will be released on a rolling basis, Sherrill said, with more detailed recommendations to follow within a year. The goal is to help policymakers find better ways to keep young people safer, but also to give parents, teachers, and others free tools to guard against the addictive nature of social media, she said.

“We’re trying to generate insights that everyone can trust, not just PR spin, and I want those insights to reach everyone in our state,” Sherrill said Monday.

Studies show nearly half of teens — and 55% of parents — agree social media is harmful to youth mental health.

The announcement is the latest step in Sherrill’s effort to curb the negative impacts of social media on young people.

In her first days in office, Sherrill signed an executive order that created an office of online youth safety within the state Department of Health, and in August she signed a package of bills that prompted additional research and outlined sweeping restrictions designed to limit kids’ access to certain apps, changes that take effect in September 2027.

“If Washington won’t lead on keeping our kids safe from big tech, then New Jersey will,” Sherrill said Monday.

New Jersey Secretary of Higher Education Margo Chaly said Rutgers was selected because it offered a “detailed, clearly defined” proposal.

The social media research team will be led by Rutgers associate psychology professor Jessica Hamilton; Jeffrey Lane, an associate professor of communication; and Vivien Wen Li Anthony, an associate professor at the school of social work and an expert in addiction.

Hamilton said work is already underway with more than two dozen teams of high school students in ten counties responding to questions about their social media use, how it impacts their mental health, and when it makes them feel worse about themselves.

“We want to better understand what specifically are the aspects of social media that are most harmful, when, and what we can do right now to make that better,” Hamilton said.

The center’s work is funded through New Jersey’s $60.7 billion budget for the current year, but the state is also anticipating at least $575 million from a legal settlement announced in August between a group of states and the tech giant Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. Meta agreed to new limits on daily platform use by teens, among other things, but did not admit to claims that it had intentionally designed addictive systems.