The National Bureau of Economic Research studied before-and-after effects of about 20,000 users who deactivated Facebook and Instagram. Their findings suggest that emotional state, happiness in particular, improved with deactivation.
We estimate the effect of social media deactivation on users’ emotional state in two large randomized experiments before the 2020 U.S. election. People who deactivated Facebook for the six weeks before the election reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness, depression, and anxiety, relative to controls who deactivated for just the first of those six weeks. People who deactivated Instagram for those six weeks reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement relative to controls. Exploratory analysis suggests the Facebook effect is driven by people over 35, while the Instagram effect is driven by women under 25.
I wish they showed results with more granularity instead of just averages and abstract effect sizes. It seems like full distributions would be more interesting at the scale they had to work with. But the results seem to make sense.
I know people who spend all day every day on social media, and I always wonder what that does to their everyday thinking. This study, and the prior studies that the NBER researchers compared against, isn’t much comfort in that department.
