By Avni Trivedi, CNN
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The minimum age requirement for most social media platforms is 13 years old, but nearly 40 percent of adolescents between the ages of eight and 12 use social media.
Doing so could lead these tweens to earlier experimentation with drugs and alcohol.
New research published this week in The American Journal of Psychiatry finds that the earlier and more rapidly adolescents use social media, the more likely they are to experiment with substances such as alcohol, tobacco and cannabis.
