Is tbh, Facebook's new teen app, as healthy as its founders claim?

The co-founder behind tbh, Facebook's latest buy, says the app is all about improving the mental health of teens. But it might not live up to those big claims

tbh / composite

For Facebook, acquiring tbh – a viral teen polling app – must have a been an easy decision. Released in early August, the app quickly picked up 2.5 million daily users and topped the app charts in the US, the only country it’s available in.

Even more crucially, the app is aimed squarely at 13 to 18-year-olds, a slice of the market that Facebook is struggling to hang onto with its own app. Facebook’s share of the 12 to 17 age group in the US is set to fall by 3.4 per cent in 2017, according to data from eMarketer. Facebook still owns Instagram, which is growing in popularity with that age group, but in the battle for teenage users, the social media giant needs all the help it can get to fend off Snapchat.

But tbh has another thing going for it. The app is all about positivity. “We built tbh because we believe that social networks should make us feel better about ourselves – not worse,” its website says.

Here’s how it works. Teenagers sign up to the app and select their school and year. They can also add friends via their username or phone contact. The app then sends its users poll questions such as, “Who is most likely to be president?”, “Too lit to be legit?”, or, “Best person to go on a roadtrip with?” Users are then asked to pick from four of their in-app or school friends which one should top the poll. If you’re picked by someone, you win a gem – a kind of in-app currency – but you’re not told who exactly picked you beyond their age and gender.

For one of the app’s co-creators, Nikita Bier, tbh is all about flipping around anonymous apps so they’re not breeding grounds for cyberbullying. “If we’re improving the mental health of millions of teens, that’s a success to us,” he told TechCrunch in an interview. But he also hinted at an even bigger mission. “Raising a ton of money, all that other stuff, it’s just an accessory to the goal. The goal is, can we make this generation happier?”

But John Torous, co-director of the digital psychiatry program at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre, says that apps should think twice before they throw around claims about improving mental health. “You wouldn’t put out claims that you’re improving cancer claims without showing data,” he says. “They should recognise that mental health issues are serious and they need to approach it with some rigour and science.”

Simon Leigh, a health economist who has authored studies into the quality of mental health apps, says tbh could widen the gap between teenagers who are already popular, and those that worry that they don’t have enough friends. “It looks like it could help the many who are fine already rather than the few that aren’t,” he says. “It could just widen the gap in social standing and belief and confidence.”

And although the app has been designed with positivity in mind – users can submit their own poll questions but only positive ones will be used in the app – Leigh says that doesn’t necessarily make for a universally positive experience. “You can extract negative things out of it if you’re consistently not being picked,” he says. “The issue is that it places too much emphasis on what other people think of you and not what you think about yourself.”

Credit: tbh / composite

But Patti Valkenburg at the University of Amsterdam says that social media can have a positive influence on teenagers’ self-esteem and psychological well-being. “That’s what we have found several times in our studies,” she says. "Sharing of positive information typically begets positive feedback from fellow social media users, which may stimulate some teens’ self-esteem and well-being."

This isn’t the case for all teenagers. “Some teenagers seem to have a stronger tendency towards upward comparison than others,” Valkenburg says. “This means that they are more likely to think that other users are better off than they themselves are: more beautiful, more intelligent, more liked by others. For these teens, the positivity bias on social media may have negative effects.”

And there might also be a problem with receiving too much positive feedback. Repeated feedback on personal qualities, Valkenburg says, can make kids more insecure. “They may worry how can they live up to the high standards that they have set themselves.”

As for the specific impact that the tbh app is having – we just don’t know. Facebook refused our request for an interview with the tbh founders and also refused to say to confirm if the app’s creators had consulted with any child mental health experts during its creation.

According to TechCrunch, the tbh app was made in two weeks, after the team behind it had tried their hands at creating around 15 different apps over the last seven years. Bier and his co-creators built a personal finance app, work time tracker, personality test and college chat app before tbh hit the big time.

Tbh has plenty of potential to have a positive impact, says Torous, but creators should know about the impact their app will have before they put it out into the world. “People shouldn’t be guinea pigs or research subjects.”

Facebook already has a mixed record when it comes to handling teenage mental health. Earlier this year a leaked internal report revealed that the social media giant told advertisers it was able to identify when teenagers feel “insecure” or “worthless”.

It’s hard to know what plans the social media company has for the app, although it has confirmed that the founders will become formal Facebook employees rather than running a bit more independently, as Instagram and WhatsApp do. The price – rumoured to be less than $100 million – certainly sounds like a steal compared to the $1 billion Facebook paid for Instagram back in 2012.

If the founders behind tbh do keep their focus on improving teenage mental health, then Leigh says that being bought by Facebook should provide great opportunities to do exactly that. If it noticed that you weren’t getting many gems, Facebook could step in a provide something positive, he says. “There’s the potential here to do a lot of good.”