The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

The surprise here is how little of an effect it has. Deactivating facebook makes you only 1/16th of one standard deviation happier. And instagram even less. And this was measured during elections, when the effect is likely to be greatest.

Kinda crazy that the magnitude is so small! (my next [admittedly rather cynical] thought is "who funded this?")

I’d be interested in the results of a study that cuts out all social media, but the problem I can already see with that is self-selection bias (the people that would volunteer for it are probably already eager to get away from social media so the results would likely be skewed).

Personally I’ve been mentally in a better place since getting rid of my social media accounts during COVID, but it does cause problems because Facebook has become a utility as well (schools and real-life social groups use it for co-ordinating activities).

I think this is an important and often overlooked phenomenon actually. Studies of Internet engagement are filled with these skewed distributions that follow something like a Pareto principle, or I've heard it termed the 90-9-1 distribution in engagement where 90% of users just lurk a bit, 9% contribute casually, and then 1% are contributing like half of the content on the platform.

It would follow logically that whatever kind of brain rot social media causes, would affect 1% of the population very dramatically, another 9% somewhat more noticeably, and then there would be this vast ocean of people who are only marginally aware/affected. From the perspective of online activity they appear to not even exist.

This always seems counterintuitive to the 9% or the 1% (and just by commenting we're already in one of those demogs). But there's lots of data out there supporting these skewed distributions in online activity.

follow the money ...

Removing one dopamine addicting and cortisol antagonising source might just be replaced by more of all the other sources that are being consumed. Perhaps they just watched TV news more, for example?

But perhaps the study shows that the effect works in the right direction even if small and even when replaced by any other behaviours that cause unhappiness, depression and anxiety.

Maybe social media usage is a symptom of unhappiness and not the cause?

These percentages are similar to those that one sees for alcohol consumption or problematic gambling.

The business model of the casinos and the drug dealers and the alcohol venders is the same - you need a huge pool of unproblematic recreational users to find the problematic users who generate the bulk of your profits.

The same model works for video games and social media.

> Kinda crazy that the magnitude is so small! (my next [admittedly rather cynical] thought is "who funded this?")

If a significant part of someone's Social life is run through Facebook, it's surprising that there's even a net positive in the end.

> The surprise here is how little of an effect it has [..] measured during elections, when the effect is likely to be greatest.

If you were depressed because of divisive politics on social media, then you leave social media during elections where divisive politics is everywhere in the real world anyway.. self-reported depression seems like it would not change much. So the results might make sense as long as they are targeting people that are old enough to be depressed by politics in the first place, and assuming politics rather than body-image issues etc is the main driver.

Some follow up questions.. does social media make divisive political issues in the real world worse? Seems like it! How old is old enough to be depressed by politics? Probably everyone now, which phenomenon is also likely caused by social media. Honestly regardless of elections, you can't actually leave social media by leaving social media anymore, it's kinda in the very fabric of things.

> my next [admittedly rather cynical] thought is "who funded this?")

Same, I mean this seems to be going against most of the other research on this. For what it's worth, here's a paper with some of the same authors on digital addiction ( https://www.nber.org/papers/w28936 ). Abstract states that

> Looking at these facts through the lens of our model suggests that self-control problems cause 31 percent of social media use.

So.. not necessarily painting social media as wonderful. Social media companies would be interested in research about social media addiction for obvious reasons, but probably do not in general want that research public. Unless of course it hurts competitors more than it hurts them, and this paper is in the middle of drama about a tiktok ban. Maybe the authors just say what people in power want to hear at the time?

The perceived utility of social media seems pretty variable, not just across people, but with the same person in different circumstances. With covid, social media might scare people out who were regular users previously, and yet for other occasional or reluctant users it's suddenly seen as the only option for human contact and they use it constantly. After lock-downs are over, people flip to the polar opposite of their previous preference. With recessions, social media might be the only affordable entertainment but during better times, many would rather do something else. In general I bet it's insanely hard to run good experiments for behavioural economics in volatile times, even if you're really trying to be careful about methodology.

> The fact that less than one percent of the people who were invited to the study completed the experiment underscores that one should be cautious in generalizing results outside our sample. Most of this sample selection is driven by the fact that only a few percent of people click on research study invitations or social media ad

The self selection bias in these ad based invitation studies is just out of whack.

I suspect that those who participate were already considering quitting.

If we want to go really wild with associations, I think the original discussion about the 90-9-1 in The Atlantic was looking at contributors to Wikipedia...!

I really hate this projecting of the software gaming industry's behavior back into the "original" vices.

The casino, liquor store and drug dealer all make the same margin regardless of who they're selling to. If anything the problem users are more likely to cause problems for them so they'd rather make the money on casual users and scale.

Having your whole operation be basically a wash except for all the money from a few people with problems is fairly unique to digital gaming and the software industry.

I think the below poster got it right. Cutting out Facebook certainly improved my life; cutting out instagram later was an additive improvement. Now I’m left with HN (which generally avoids the bad parts of social media) and Reddit (which has plenty of brain rot).

It also took a lot more than 6 weeks to get acclimated to it. You get psychological withdrawal. It took months for it to feel normal. My income went up a lot in the years after as well (in part due to more time to focus on finding a new job), so that also contributed to my happiness.

> "who funded this?"

Page 7 of the PDF shows the following:

"This project is part of the U.S. 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study (Gonz´alez-Bail´on et al. 2023; Guess et al. 2023a,b; Nyhan et al. 2023; Allcott et al. 2024), a partnership between Meta researchers and unpaid independent academics. Under the terms of the collaboration, the independent academic authors had final authority over the pre-analysis plan, data analysis, and manuscript text, and Meta could not block any results from being published."

It’s marginal but the study addresses this, it says essentially it’s impossible to tell if the participants are telling the truth about deactivation, as well as if they are supplementing their Facebook time with other platforms.

For example, if you deactivate Facebook but still doom scroll the NY Times et al homepages. Your happiness wouldn’t necessarily change because almost ALL media has adopted the addictive techniques of social media.

Well the study was a couple of weeks, right? I guess it takes time to rebound.

While it may be true that margins are independent of the buyer at a given scale, margins certainly do depend on scale. If 15% of the population is buying 75% of the alcohol (these are not ridiculous numbers), cutting that 15% out would put many alcohol producers (in particular those who sell cheap) out of business.

The top 10% of drinkers consume the majority of alcohol. Their average consumption is over 10 drinks per day, which I think clearly suggestions a problem. I think it's hard to imagine that losing >50% of revenue wouldn't matter to sellers.

Gambling is also very skewed. Studies place it something like 5% of in person gamblers accounting for 50% of profits or 1% for online gambling. I would guess for sports betting it's similar.

Of course it's not even really specific to vices, the top 10% of travelers take around 50% of flights, and you see similar effects in pretty much every area of consumption.

It's like if you ask people to quit drinking beer but then they just drink wine instead. It might be a tiny bit healthier but it doesn't get at the underlying problem. And it wouldn't be fair to fault beer by itself for their negative experiences.

I find Reddit (and HN to a lesser extent) even worse than Facebook. There is a lot more content, for one thing, and so it's easier to waste even more time :(. I wish I could quit...

I think social media has some sort of amplifier effect. If you are someone easily influenced, you'll be a lot more affected compared to someone who is more of a sceptic. If you are already depressed, it'll probably make it worse when you see holiday pictures of everyone in your network (no one shares pictures where they look like shit). If you are in a good place in life, you'll probably be smashing the like button without care.

In any case I didn't like the amplification - unamplified life is hard enough - so I got rid of it a long time ago and don't regret it at all.

The issue is related to addiction.

People can’t get addicted to flying in the same manner as we have seen people get addicted to gambling or to some of these social media applications.

I don’t think it would put them out of business. Rather they would have to increase costs to stay in business.

Essentially a disturbing way to look at it is that the people with alcohol addiction are allowing everyone else to be able to consume alcohol for cheaper than it would otherwise be.

Same phenomena exist for other addictive things like sugar in soda and free to play video games. (Although obviously soda and video games are nowhere close to alcohol in terms of destructive potential for those who develop an addiction).