Social media causes depression?
Some friends of mine who are looking at the effect of social media on depression shared a handful of studies with me. Here’s what I learned from them:
- All of the studies distinguished between passive social media use (mindless scrolling) and active social media use (posting, commenting). In general, increases in depression only correlate with passive social media use. Active social media use may actually be correlated with decreases in depression!
- Does passive social media use cause depression, or does depression cause passive social media use? It’s hard to disentangle the effects, especially with all the feedback loops inherent in this, but it appears that both happen to some extent, both over short timeframes and long timeframes. The arrow of causality is likely stronger in the direction of depression causing increased social media use.
Thus, if you find yourself scrolling while checked-out, it might be useful to think of it as a sign that you should introspect about your emotional state. If you spend huge amounts of time scrolling, it’s probably a sign that you should think about what changes you might want to make to structure of your life to increase happiness and/or talk to a therapist.
These findings also seem to imply that Facebook could easily build a feature that detects passive Facebook use and tries to gently push the user toward active use. I don’t have access to the numbers, but I’m guessing that depressed, passive facebook users don’t click on ads very often, so it’s not in Facebook’s best interest to keep users in a passive state. Instead, Facebook should be using this opportunity to figure out how to delight the user and get them reconnected to what they care about. They have massive amounts of data on their users. Why not put it to good use to help their users become happier and more engaged?
At the end of the day, this is a super hard thing to untangle because of the feedback loop between passive social media use and depression, as well as the myriad other factors that could be at work (eg a third factor like unemployment causing both increased time for social media and increased depression)
Studies looking to tease out the direction either do direct intervention (eg forcing someone to passively scroll) or look for time-delayed correlation (eg is depression at time1 more predictive of passive social media use at time2 or vice versa).
In case you want to look these studies up on sci-hub(dot)tw, here are their DOIs:
10.1089/cyber.2017.0668
10.1177/0894439317721981
ppw.kuleuven.be/okp/_pdf/Verduyn2015PFUUA.pdf (direct link)