Social media doesn't affect your emotional life, study finds (Patreon)

 [This is a transcript with links to references.]

A study just out from researchers at Durham University in the UK has found that reducing social media use doesn’t have much of an effect on people’s emotional life one way or another.

The question whether social media impacts mental health has been hotly discussed among psychologists and sociologists in recent years. One hypothesis has it that going off social media reduces stress and improves well-being. The other hypothesis is that social media is in some sense addictive, and discontinuing it causes stress, at least temporarily.

There have been many prior studies on the topic, but the results have been inconsistent and therefore, in bulk, inconclusive. One study found for example that people who limited facebook use to 20 minutes a day reported improved well-being and fewer depressive symptoms. Other studies found no effect at all. Those are just two examples of dozens of studies whose results don’t fit together.

On the one hand that’s good because whatever I feel like doing, I’ll find a study that supports my decision. On the other hand, I’d like to be smart about what I’m doing, so I want to know what social media does to my brain, wouldn’t you want to know, too? Ok, maybe people watching this video are a somewhat biased sample.

Well, in any case, for the new study, they followed a group of 51 students at Durham University in the UK. Could have been 52, but one person was excluded because they didn’t have an iPhone. That was mean guys, really mean.

Ok, so we have 51 iPhone-using students in the UK, who significantly decreased their social media intake for 6 days and were tested for a bunch of things before, during, and after intervention. The results were totally unremarkable. They did see an oh-so-slight decrease in negative emotions and boredom, but that was pretty much it.

The researchers say that their findings indicate that stopping social media use might remove influences that cause negative emotions, like constant social comparison and fear of missing out, but can also remove things that cause positive emotions, such as social connectivity, which explains why it’s such a mixed bag.

Another massive study that appeared this month looked at health data from almost two and a half million people all over the world and found no correlation between internet use and mental health. Indeed, mental health by and large has been stable for decades while internet use has gone from no-one to almost everyone.

Why can’t these psychologists agree on what social media does to us? Well, the issue is that there are a lot of variables in this question. For example, it depends on what social media you use. As we all know, some of it is worse than others, and renaming it from twitter to X didn’t help. And a group of students at a British university probably has a different social media experience than, say, a group of farmers in southern Tennessee.

Yet another study on social media which appeared this week found that LinkedIn triggers impostor syndrome. That makes sense to me because I’m really just pretending to use it.