Facebook has acknowledged what multiple studies have already confirmed – the social network has a tendency to make users depressed, stressed, and envious.
After years of studies pointing to negative experiences for users of Facebook, the social media giant has finally conceded that users may experience periods of sadness or depression. “In general, when people spend a lot of time passively consuming information — reading but not interacting with people — they report feeling worse afterward,” Facebook wrote in a new blog post titled “Hard Questions: Is Spending Time on Social Media Bad for Us?”.
Facebook mentions a University of Michigan study titled “Passive Facebook usage undermines affective well-being: Experimental and longitudinal evidence.” In the study students were randomly assigned to read Facebook for ten minutes. The students who only scrolled reported feeling in a worse mood by the end of the day when compared to students who talked to friends and posted on Facebook. The blog post also mentions a study from UC San Diego and Yale which found that people who clicked on about four times as many links as the average person, or who liked twice as many posts, reported worse mental health than average in a survey.
The blog also notes that a study conducted by Facebook and Robert Kraut at Carnegie Mellon University found that people who sent or received more messages, comments and Timeline posts reported improvements in social support, depression and loneliness.
Simply broadcasting status updates wasn’t enough; people had to interact one-on-one with others in their network. Other peer-reviewed longitudinal research and experiments have found similar positive benefits between well-being and active engagement on Facebook.
Facebook concludes their post by stating that their research and the academic literature “suggests that it’s about how you use social media that matters when it comes to your well-being.” Interestingly, Facebook’s solution to negative emotional responses caused by too much Facebook is basically to use Facebook more often and in a more social manner. Facebook writes:
According to the research, it really comes down to how you use the technology. For example, on social media, you can passively scroll through posts, much like watching TV, or actively interact with friends — messaging and commenting on each other’s posts. Just like in person, interacting with people you care about can be beneficial, while simply watching others from the sidelines may make you feel worse.
Although Facebook is only now publicly discussing the effects of the social network being so heavily intertwined with billions of people’s lives, there have been studies examining the issue since at least 2013. Reuters UK reported that a group of researchers from the Institute of Information Systems at Berlin’s Humboldt University found that “one in three people felt worse after visiting the site and more dissatisfied with their lives, while people who browsed without contributing were affected the most.”
“We were surprised by how many people have a negative experience from Facebook with envy leaving them feeling lonely, frustrated or angry,” researcher Hanna Krasnova told Reuters.
According to a 2014 study published in Computers in Human Behavior, most users are not very social when using social media, choosing instead to passively consume information. The study, “Facebook’s emotional consequences: Why Facebook causes a decrease in mood and why people still use it,” found that this leaves users feeling unfulfilled and dissatisfied. Users experienced a decline in mood after spending time scrolling through Facebook. The mood decline was not prevalent during browsing the Internet in general. The researchers believe people leave Facebook feeling as if they wasted their time and this causes them to feel sad for being unproductive.
Another study published in the June 2016 issue of Current Opinion in Psychology found that Facebook contributes to envy of friends and could lead to depression. A February 2017 study, titled “Association of Facebook Use with Compromised Well-Being: A Longitudinal Study,” argues that using Facebook regularly can have a negative effect on a person’s well being. “Exposure to the carefully curated images from others’ lives leads to negative self-comparison, and the sheer quantity of social media interaction may detract from more meaningful real-life experiences,” the report says.
In the report “Seeing Everyone Else’s Highlight Reels: How Facebook Usage is Linked to Depressive Symptoms,” researchers investigated how social comparison to peers through Facebook interactions might impact users’ psychological health. The research provides evidence that people feel depressed after spending a large amount of time on Facebook. The problem was again attributed to comparing oneself to others.
Indeed, the concern over Facebook use was recently echoed by Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president. Parker was speaking at an Axios event at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia when he discussed the origins and implications of Facebook:
“The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’” Parker said.
“And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever,” he told Axios. “And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you … more likes and comments.”
Parker added: “It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”
“The inventors, creators — it’s me, it’s Mark Zuckerberg, it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people — understood this consciously,” he said. “And we did it anyway.
As Aaron Kesel recently noted for Activist Post,
This is also not the first time Facebook has been outed for manipulating perception. In 2014 they were exposed for blatantly targeting human emotions in an experiment without their users’ knowledge:
[...]
Facebook revealed that it had manipulated the news feeds of over half a million randomly selected users to change the number of positive and negative posts they saw. It was part of a psychological study to examine how emotions can be spread on social media. (Source)
The implications of these studies should not be ignored. The world’s largest social network is already a partner of the U.S. government and maintains close relationships with intelligence agencies around the world. The fact that we also know the platform is harming us on an emotional, psychological, and possibly even spiritual level, should not be taken lightly.
Image credit: Anthony Freda Art
I am an investigative journalist and liberty activist; a Lead Investigative Reporter for ActivistPost.com and the founder of the TheConsciousResistance.com & The Houston Free Thinkers. I have also co-authored three books with @johnvibes: The Conscious Resistance: Reflections on Anarchy and Spirituality and Finding Freedom in an Age of Confusion, Vol. 1 and Finding Freedom in an Age of Confusion, Vol. 2
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I spend more time on Steemit nowadays. I go to facebook to share my Steemit posts and see how my friends are doing.
That is me too. I keep the FB to promote Steemit and check for messages. My wall there has become so very thin now, not much in the way of real news being allowed either. Steemit simply gives me a better feeling all the way around. Good to meet you! Steem on...
Yes- Steemit is much better! My facebook feed and pages now are full of Steemit articles, news, videos, etc. Nice to meet you as well! Followed! :)
There is zero need for FB anymore, now that we have Steemit, Dtube, and Gab. Thanks for speaking out on this, @dbroze! 100% Upvoted and Resteemed!
Gab?
https://www.gab.ai It is a censorship free alternative to twitter. Check it out! It's awesome! People are leaving twitter in droves since they have started banning people and closing their accounts. There are multiple class action suits filed. Followed u!
Wow great sounds good cheers!
I highly recommend that people worried about this use news feed blockers on Facebook.
If you don't know what these are they're browser extensions that hide Facebook's general "news feed" so you can only write posts, send and receive instant messages, accept event invites, etc.
For most university students at least (which is what I can speak for) the latter features are pretty essential to day to day social life stuff, but by blocking the newsfeed you take away the bottomless scroll pit of addictive and exaggerated portrayals of people's lives.
That's a great recommendation! @kennyskitchen is always telling people about how he has simply un-followed every friend he has and page he's liked on FB, so that the "feed" column is always completely empty... but a browser extension seems like a much easier option for most folks.
I'd say it definitely kills relationships. Time spent together is divided into time spent checking the phone (mostly Facebook) and actively engaging with the person in front of you.
Yeah, I hate when other person draws his phone when talking to me.
Great comment. Upvoted and followed ya'....But, there's one problem... Go Red Sox! Fenway all the way, baby!
The problem is that some of these finding transfer to any social network usage, and you can include Steemit in that. It would be interesting to see what the difference is in social media usage and whether or not a completely alternative social media like Steemit has any balancing qualities. I hazard that it is not completely without it's similar downsides.
That is quite true. There is something to be said for the desire to find social interaction through a computer screen, and not in physicality, as well as the whole "scrolling your feed" issue. Certainly, options like Steemit are better in some ways, like the lack of targeting algorithms (your feed is just posts of the people you follow, in chronological order) the lack of advertising and "news" all around the sides of your screen, and the generally higher quality of content and more authenticity of communication here.
Oh man I feel WAYYY better using Steemit than FB. I see creators! I can follow them and actually see their posts! Facebook USED to make me feel amazing, now, it makes me depressed almost instantly. I used to spend 3-4 hours a day replying to messages and comments I got about my art. NOw I rarely get ANY notifications or messages about my art, and the ones I do get are from the same 3 people
The effect on mood is clear. But Facebook still plays its role in connecting people. For me, it is far easier to write a message to a friend 10km away than to phone him. I also modified my feed, so I have opinions of most good politicians at one place and don't need to rely on news to report on it. Informational value of some pages is like of gold.
It is true that Facebook may emotionally hurt you. It all depends on how you use it.
I for one, only keep using Facebook because content creators I appreciate still stay there, though I hardly post anything anymore over there. I hate Facebook for collecting information on their users but we had no other option until not very long ago.
Decentralized social networks are the future, and are better for all users.
People are sheep. Plain and simple. They will hopefully seen the light soon 💯
Upvoted! As soon as Steemit gets Direct Messaging, it's over for the other social media networks.
So true!
Only today I wrote a piece encouraging my FB cohorts to ditch the site and join the thinking persons platform of preference Steemit!
I didn't talk about the genuine nature of intelligent encouragement and comments I witness here which was a big miss on my part :) Nor did I mention the feeling of having found my place...
Steemit is a far more rounded experience than FB and your findings do not surprise me and , if honest, I can relate to them.
Happy to be here :)
Please feel free to let me know your thoughts on my piece: https://steemit.com/inspiration/@ldacey-laforge/why-you-should-consider-ditching-facebook-today
I wish you happiness, health and continued success for 2018 and beyond.
xox
Very interesting post. Since I became active on Steemit, I am barely on FB at all and perhaps I'll be able to wind that down completely soon.
Congratulations! This post has been upvoted from the communal account, @minnowsupport, by dbroze from the Minnow Support Project. It's a witness project run by aggroed, ausbitbank, teamsteem, theprophet0, someguy123, neoxian, followbtcnews/crimsonclad, and netuoso. The goal is to help Steemit grow by supporting Minnows and creating a social network. Please find us in the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network (PALnet) Discord Channel. It's a completely public and open space to all members of the Steemit community who voluntarily choose to be there.
If you would like to delegate to the Minnow Support Project you can do so by clicking on the following links: 50SP, 100SP, 250SP, 500SP, 1000SP, 5000SP. Be sure to leave at least 50SP undelegated on your account.
What an amazing article you just written! Congrats! It is one of the best I read on this platform. I would take a deeper diving into myself to find out why this addiction for facebook is so big for me. Maybe I will cure from this "facebook" disease. Because it is kind of contagious disease at the moment.
Upvoted, fallowed and Resteem is the obvious answer to this wonderful post.
The dopamine hit - its like drugging her users to addiction just to make more profits...Not so fair facebook!! Not so fair
you fail to answer the question you pose in the title and spend your time talking about the most obvious aspects and then drop 2 sentences on the police state aspect at the end. yes it hurts feelings, that is very very old news.
the reason not to use facebrak is it is a monitoring tool that will be used to destroy social movements, not unlike tcr, that is, if tcr were not themselves cops
tcr=cops
I have written about that elsewhere. It was not the focus of this piece. keep wasting your time if you like. Your accusations are unfounded and ridiculous.
you did not write about that elsewhere, you evaded the question elsewhere when it was directly asked. that was my first question to you, 'why are you using facebrak' and your responded on two different days with opposite answers, then a few days later released this fluff piece that refuse to deal with the difficult questions and chooses to spend many paragraphs on the obvious old news.
your 'movement' is ridiculous so i am ridiculing you. your answers and condescending dismissals have been inconsistent with anything other than a government psy-op front organization.
At first, I'm not kidding, I was afraid to check my replies and that I would have to read a lot to understand your complex responses to my inquiries.
Now it is obvious you are completely incapable of interacting on my level and so your only tool is the condescending dismissal.
I have personally been infiltrated by several undercover police who got very close to me, and across the board they are incapable of discussing radical or spiritual philosophy with any degree of intelligence and will always change the subject or find a way to sit and listen to you talk rather than reveal anything of themselves. They will also refuse any actual investigation of the course of events and try to change the narrative.
You fit this pattern perfectly. You could have just answered my questions when I was merely critical and curious, now I am highly suspicious.
Anyone actually curious to know whether TCR is the police just has to spend 15 minutes reviewing our dialogue, recorded by the blockchain, and they will see that I the one accurately describing the course of events. And that you are acting like 5 people controlling the same account, none of whom knows what anarchy or spirituality even is.
"I have personally been infiltrated by several undercover police who got very close to me"
Well this at least explains your paranoid stance.
This is the primary purpose of this account on the blockchain, to report my experiences of the american secret police/police state in a forum where it can't be erased in case I get erased. That this platform is capable of this is far from determined.
These agencies will find any functioning social entity(ie a blockchain, a festival, an activist organisation) and they have unlimited resources to infiltrate it and steer it in any direction they want.
Yours is the first actual empathetic reaction to what I am talking about, the rest of the responses to my concerns about TCR are meaningless distractions, this is the best indication I could provide to the public to avoid this organization.
People who sign up to be undercover police would not do so if they undertood what anarchy was or the current phase of history, in which the only role they can really play are stooges for global elites and their supercomputers.
As stated, there was a national entrapment hunt for human traffickers at wal mart parking lots all across the united states, but not a single investigation of St. James Island.
After it became obvious to me what was going on, I got angry about it and decided to use what I have learned to test other organizations to see if they might be cops too.
And TCR is cops.
Wanna know the easiest way to spot the fed? It's the one guy in the room claiming that people doing important work are cops...
It could be, you are good to be suspicious in times like these.
However, cops will be the ones evading questions and refusing to allow a narrative to be formed. They will also preclude anyone asking questions that they don't want asked, and they will never try to check up on the story of one of their fellow cops.
I'm telling you that even dbroze's response to me just above this, is the 4th different way he's answered the same question in a week. I engaged simply to ask questions and I was curious about how the whole TCR operates and looks so pretty.
The answers I got made no sense whatsoever, and dbroze was both rude and inconsistent. This is verifiable on the blockchain.
Yes, I am critical and I do not cushion my questions. Any actual anarchist should be used to this, not trying to hide behind politeness, status and formality, which dbroze has.
He also admits to letting other people operate his personal account, and this is, besides using a government spying tool as the backbone of his communications strategy, a form of representation that anarchists find utterly repugnant.
Further, the idea that an org can have a 'great leader' like dbroze and a centralized structure is utterly naive in 2017, only someone who had just started being an activist yesterday or who was a cop, would even attempt to create an org like this.
You have been warned. Either join the discussion by researching my claims or stfu. Read my fucking blog, I have personally revealed several known government infiltrators and dozens of their tactics, that I have found them using against me and I am not even a big shot running an org, I am a single individual artist.
Of the two of us, if you think i look like more of a cop, you were born yesterday. I'm risking everything to write what I do with no help whatsoever, it seems mr broze gets tons of free stuff(people volunteer to work on the website!) and gets to be a very popular guy for writing cruft and claiming to be a guru.
Take a step back dude, use your head for something besides a hat rack.
Facebook has both good and bad effects
Some it make us feels hapoy but sonetimes it depressed us also because of our expectations
Other than this facebook is the great pkatform through which many peoples are met and the got married and speding there life hapily. Facebook us that thing which connects world and the slogan is be like on my views 'divided by nations , united by facebook"
Sir u provide great knowledge and it is aprreciatable thank you sir now i am understand what is fb really is
Thank you sir for this great information
I deleted my Facebook account and have not regretted it one bit
People way up the cost/benefit of using Facebook and think it's a fair trade off.
THANK YOU for this post, I'll be sharing for sure. Confirming what we already knew, FB is doing more harm than good...
Thank you for this great post! It made me sad reading it as I have family members glued to facebook. It's just so sad people don't realize or believe they are being changed by it. Nice work! I reposted in hopes they will see it.
let's just face it facebook is boring it's obvious.. we are a facebook free family at home there is no way I would waste my valuable free time on such a boring spying platform.
I stay away from Facebook. Facebook likes to control you in every way including your life.
Facebook sucks.............
They hide all the posts from pages and groups you like, and only show you crap, then blame you for not interacting with the crap. Pardon my French, but fuck Facebook
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/11/16761016/former-facebook-exec-ripping-apart-society
"He went on to describe an incident in India where hoax messages about kidnappings shared on WhatsApp led to the lynching of seven innocent people."
The end of this is that most Americans, let alone those in less developed nations, are not adult enough to use a computer without harming them or others with it.
This is a privilege, not a right, and it has a cost of entry that comes with the want to prove you can handle the responsiblity of using the tools.
Akin to a gun.
I have had loved ones including a wife and parents attempt to murder me via suicide or make such claims after the fact related to violence done to me.
I see a deep set of problems with Facebook and how State and others abuse it.
The problem is the malice and intent related to same. And then coding paradigms to do just that. That being: Abuse people psychologically.
I stopped using Facebook because I expeirenced this depressing effect.
Thank you so much for this truly inspiring piece!! I am very grateful to be shifting my perspective on social media. Special thanks to you and others like you <3