The unintended consequences of social media
The best thing you can do this holiday is to delete your Facebook, Instagram and TikTok accounts
In 2008, the average American spent less than 20 minutes per day on their phone. Today, it is almost four hours. The reason? Social media. Few of us would deny that the arrival of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and, most recently, TikTok have radically altered the way we engage with the world around us. And that the consequences of algorithms trained to induce dopamine injections every time someone watches, likes, or retweets you are poorly understood.
At the same time, the incidence of mental health among young adults has increased exponentially. Between 2008 and 2018 in the United States, for example, the number of individuals who reported experiencing a major depressive episode almost doubled. Over the same period, suicide became the second leading cause of death for individuals between 15 and 24 years old. Although statistics for South Africa are not as easily accessible, the figure below shows that South Africans’ mental health is close to the world average, with around one in eight people suffering from poor mental health or substance use disorders. But there are signs that it is worsening, especially for young people. To give just one tentative statistic: In the last four years, 43 learners have died by suicide in Western Cape schools alone.
Is this deterioration in mental health caused by social media usage?
Speak to parents or teachers, and they seem to suggest that it is. At a recent dinner party, a student told me a tragic story of how his peers constantly feel the need to engage on social media. The consequence is that many of them rarely sleep more than an hour or two per night without checking their phones for messages. Sleep deprivation, as we know, is a strong determinant of mental health. One parent told me of her struggle to regulate her daughter’s phone use. The number of likes you receive on Instagram determines your social status; her daughter spends hours curating a photo, only to delete it if the ‘sufficient’ number of likes does not arrive. ‘She is entirely missing her teenage years’, the mother lamented. Others noted the need many students felt to have the latest iPhone, even if its services are indistinguishable from last year’s edition. The consequence is that kids are willing to forgo so many other experiences simply to afford the ‘sickest’ brands.
But anecdotes are not how causality is established in social science. It might be that, for some other reason, Generation Z is more vulnerable to depression, and that their social media usage is simply a reflection of that, ie reverse causation. Or the correlation might simply be spurious; it is something else, a global financial crisis perhaps, that contributed to both social media use and the higher incidence of mental health. If only we could find a way to test this.
That is exactly what a new paper by three economists published in the American Economic Review does. They use the rollout of Facebook on US campuses between 2004 and 2006 to assess whether it resulted in a higher incidence of poor mental health. The results suggest we need to radically adjust our behaviour.
Facebook was created at Harvard University in February 2004. For the first two and a half years, it was not public but made available to US colleges in a staggered fashion. The authors employ two datasets in their analysis. They first specify the month in which Facebook was introduced at 775 US colleges. The second is a set of surveys across the same period that asked questions about student mental and physical health. Their research design relies on the fact that the rollout of Facebook is staggered: they can thus rule out other things, like college-specific differences, differences across time, or any other factor correlated to student health. Their results can thus be interpreted as causal.
What do they find? They first construct an index of poor mental health. This requires combining students’ ratings on statements like ‘Last year felt hopeless’, ‘Last year felt exhausted’ or ‘Last year severely depressed’. They then compare these answers for colleges in the months after receiving Facebook to before.
Students exposed to Facebook, the authors find, are more likely to suffer from mental illness. Signing up to Facebook increased the share of students suffering from depression by two percentage points, from 25% to 27%. Is this a large effect? One way to interpret the size of the coefficients is to compare them to other big shocks that result in poor mental health, like job losses. The authors find that signing up to Facebook is equivalent to 22% of a job loss. Consider just how devastating a job loss is for any individual, with all its financial, social, and psychological implications, and then you’ll realise how remarkably devastating signing up to a social media platform is.
The authors also find three additional results. First, the effects are largest for students that are typically more likely to be most susceptible to mental illness. Second, the effects become larger the longer students are exposed to Facebook. Third, students who experienced worsening mental health also reported other side effects, like poorer academic performance.
Finally, the big question: Why does social media have this impact? The authors argue convincingly that it is that Facebook increases ‘students’ ability to engage in unfavourable social comparisons’, in other words, students suddenly compare themselves to curated projections of others. Here the authors draw two particularly interesting conclusions: First, the effects are largest for students who are not frequently in social contact with others, like those who live off-campus, students with lower socioeconomic status, and students that do not belong to fraternities. Second, the authors find that Facebook changed students’ beliefs about the behaviour of their friends, notably about alcohol usage. In short, isolated and vulnerable students tend to think that their Facebook friends are frequently having a good time while they are stuck at home. I suspect that this is even worse during the holiday season when students return to their families and are more isolated from their friends.
As schools and universities struggle to engage students in a post-Covid world, let’s not forget the potentially devastating effects of social media platforms that are now ubiquitous. What to do to mitigate its worst effects is less clear. Perhaps a first, tentative step this holiday season is to delete those social media apps on your phone before you head to the beach.
An edited version of this article was first published on News24. Photo by Mariia Shalabaieva on Unsplash. Data by Codera Analytics.