Short read: The Effect of Deactivating Facebook and Instagram on Users’ Emotional State

Now here is a slightly longer summary of this research paper: “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.”

Here are couple of the other interesting aspects of the findings which suggest that Insta and Facebook are especially harmful (compared to other apps) regardless of whether you are interested in politics or not: “Two additional results provide insight into mechanisms. First, app use data show that when people deactivate, most of time freed by Facebook deactivation and all of time freed by Instagram deactivation is substituted to other smartphone apps. Thus, we expect no effect on offline time for individuals in the Instagram group and some moderate effects on offline time for those in the Facebook group. Instead, this suggests that the effects are mostly driven by the different user experiences of Facebook or Instagram compared to other apps.

Second, the effects are not significantly different for people with higher online or offline baseline political engagement. This provides no evidence that the effects are driven by factors specific to the election period.”