The rise of social media has provoked both optimism about potential societal benefits and concern about harms such as addiction, depression, and political polarization.
In a randomized experiment, we find that deactivating Facebook for the 4 weeks before the 2018 US midterm election:
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reduced online activity, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends;
Our first set of results focuses on substitution patterns. A key mechanism for effects on individual well-being would be if social media use crowds out face-to-face social interactions and thus deepens loneliness and depression (2017, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us). A key mechanism for political externalities would be if social media crowds out consumption of higher-quality news and information sources. We find evidence consistent with the first of these but not the second. Deactivating Facebook freed up 60 minutes per day for the average person in our Treatment group. The Treatment group actually spent less time on both non-Facebook social media and other online activities, while devoting more time to a range of offline activities such as watching television alone and spending time with friends and family. The Treatment group did not change its consumption of any other online or offline news sources and reported spending 15% less time consuming news.
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reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization;
Consistent with the reported reduction in news consumption, we find that Facebook deactivation statistically-significantly reduced news knowledge and attention to politics. The Treatment group was less likely to say they follow news about politics or the President, and less able to correctly answer factual questions about recent news events. Our overall index of news knowledge fell by 0.19 standard deviations. There is no detectable effect on political engagement, as measured by voter turnout in the midterm election and the likelihood of clicking on email links to support political causes. Deactivation statistically-significantly reduced polarization of views on policy issues and a measure of exposure to polarizing news. Deactivation did not statistically-significantly reduce affective polarization (ie. negative feelings about the other political party) or polarization in factual beliefs about current events, although the coefficient estimates also point in that direction. Our overall index of political polarization fell by 0.16 standard deviations. As a point of comparison, prior work has found that a different index of political polarization rose by 0.38 standard deviations 1996–222018 (2018).
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increased subjective well-being; and
deactivation caused small but statistically-significant improvements in well-being, and in particular in self-reported happiness, life satisfaction, depression, and anxiety. Effects on subjective well-being as measured by responses to brief daily text messages are positive but not statistically-significant. Our overall index of subjective well-being improved by 0.09 standard deviations. As a point of comparison, this is about 25–40% of the effect of psychological interventions including self-help therapy, group training, and individual therapy, as reported in a meta-analysis by et al 2013. These results are consistent with prior studies suggesting that Facebook may have adverse effects on mental health. However, we also show that the magnitudes of our causal effects are far smaller than those we would have estimated using the correlational approach of much prior literature. We find little evidence to support the hypothesis suggested by prior work that Facebook might be more beneficial for “active” users: for example, users who regularly comment on pictures and posts from friends and family instead of just scrolling through their news feeds.
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caused a large persistent reduction in post-experiment Facebook use.
As the experiment ended, participants reported planning to use Facebook much less in the future. Several weeks later, the Treatment group’s reported usage of the Facebook mobile app was about 11 minutes (22%) lower than in Control. The Treatment group was more likely to click on a post-experiment email providing information about tools to limit social media usage, and 5% of the Treatment group still had their accounts deactivated 9 weeks after the experiment ended. Our overall index of post-experiment Facebook use is 0.61 standard deviations lower in Treatment than in Control. In response to open-answer questions several weeks after the experiment ended, the Treatment group was more likely to report that they were using Facebook less, had uninstalled the Facebook app from their phones, and were using the platform more judiciously. Reduced post-experiment use aligns with our finding that deactivation improved subjective well-being, and it is also consistent with the hypotheses that Facebook is habit forming in the sense of 1988 or that people learned that they enjoy life without Facebook more than they had anticipated.
Deactivation reduced post-experiment valuations of Facebook, suggesting that traditional metrics may overstate consumer surplus.
…We recruited a sample of 2,743 users through Facebook display ads, and elicited their willingness-to-accept (WTA) to deactivate their Facebook accounts for a period of 4 weeks ending just after the election. We then randomly assigned the 61% of these subjects with WTA less than $102 to either a Treatment group that was paid to deactivate, or a Control group that was not. We verified compliance with deactivation by regularly checking participants’ public profile pages. We measured a suite of outcomes using text messages, surveys, emails, direct measurement of Facebook and Twitter activity, and administrative voting records. Less than 2% of the sample failed to complete the endline survey, and the Treatment group’s compliance with deactivation exceeded 90%.
…We are aware of 12 existing randomized impact evaluations of Facebook. The most closely related is the important paper et al 2018, which was made public the month before ours. That paper also uses Facebook deactivation to study news knowledge and well-being, finding results broadly consistent with those reported here. Online Appendix Table A1 details these experiments in comparison to ours. Our deactivation period is substantially longer and our sample size an order of magnitude larger than most prior experimental work, including et al 2018. We measure impacts on a relatively comprehensive range of outcomes, and we are the only one of these randomized trials to have submitted a pre-analysis plan. Given the effect sizes and residual variance in our sample, we would have been unlikely to have sufficient power to detect any effects if limited to the sample sizes in previous experiments. Our work also relates to quasi-experimental estimates of social media effects by 2018 and et al 2018.
…Thus, the effect of deactivating Facebook is equal to the conditional difference in subjective well-being from about $30,000 additional income. This income equivalent is large because “money doesn’t buy happiness”: although income is correlated with SWB, the slope of that relationship is not very steep.
…We can also compare our SWB effects to what we would have estimated using the kind of correlational approach taken by many previous non-experimental studies. These studies often have specific designs and outcomes that don’t map closely to our paper, so it is difficult to directly compare effect sizes with other papers. We can, however, replicate the empirical strategy of simple correlation studies in our data, and compare our cross-sectional correlations to the experimental results. To do this, we regress SWB outcomes at baseline on daily average Facebook use over the past 4 weeks as of baseline, divided by the local average treatment effect of deactivation on daily average Facebook use between midline and endline, so that the coefficients are both in units of average use per day over the past 4 weeks.26
The baseline correlation between our SWB index and Facebook use is about 3× larger than the experimental estimate of the treatment effect of deactivation (about 0.23 SD compared to 0.09 SD), and the point estimates are highly statistically-significantly different. Controlling for basic demographics brings down the non-experimental estimate somewhat, but it remains economically and statistically larger than our experimental estimate. Online Appendix Figure A32 presents the full results for all SWB outcomes.27 These findings are consistent with reverse causality, for example if people who are lonely or depressed spending more time on Facebook, or with omitted variables, for example if lower socioeconomic status is associated with both heavy use and lower well-being. They could also reflect a difference between the relatively short-term effects measured in our experiment and the longer-term effects picked up in the cross section. However, the lack of a detectable trend in treatment effects on the text message outcomes over the course of our experiment (as noted above and seen in Online Appendix Figure A31) points away from this hypothesis.
…Others described the difficulty of not being able to post for special events such as family birthdays and not being able to participate in online groups.
…Deactivation clearly reduced post-experiment demand for Facebook. These effects are very stark, with by far the largest magnitude of any of our main findings. The effect on reported intentions to use Facebook as of the endline survey is a reduction of 0.78 standard deviations: while the average Control group participant planned to reduce future Facebook use by 22%, deactivation caused the Treatment group to plan to reduce Facebook use by an additional 21% relative to Control. In our post-endline survey a month after the experiment ended, we measured whether people actually followed through on these intentions, by asking people how much time they had spent on the Facebook mobile app on the average day in the past week. Deactivation reduces this post-endline Facebook mobile app use by 12 minutes per day, or 0.31 standard deviations. This is a 23% reduction relative to the Control group mean of 53 minutes per day, lining up almost exactly with the planned reductions reported at endline. However, online Appendix Table A13 shows that the reduction is less than half as large (8% of the Control group mean) and not statistically-significant (with a t-statistic of −1.16) if we limit the sample to iPhone users who reported their usage as recorded by their Settings app, thereby excluding participants who were reporting personal estimates of their usage.
…Our results leave little doubt that Facebook provides large benefits for its users. Even after a 4-week “detox”, our participants spent substantial time on Facebook every day and needed to be paid large amounts of money to give up Facebook. Our results on news consumption and knowledge suggest that Facebook is an important source of news and information. Our participants’ answers in free response questions and follow-up interviews make clear the diverse ways in which Facebook can improve people’s lives, whether as a source of entertainment, a means to organize a charity or an activist group, or a vital social lifeline for those who are otherwise isolated. Any discussion of social media’s downsides should not obscure the basic fact that it fulfills deep and widespread needs.
Notwithstanding, our results also make clear that the downsides are real.