Massive New Study, Covering 72 Countries, Nearly 1 Million People, Finds Zero Evidence That Facebook Leads To Psychological Harm

Professor Andrew Przybylski from the Oxford Internet Institute is one of the best, most important researchers out there providing thorough, comprehensive, empirical evidence that every tech moral panic is not supported by the data. We've covered his work before, including the complete lack of evidence that social media makes kids unhappy, how there's actually some positive correlation between people playing video games and feeling better (the opposite of what most seemed to believe), and how mandatory internet filters to stop porn don't work.

He's now back with a new study (with Professor Matti Vuorre), and the scale of it is astounding:

The independent Oxford study used well-being data from nearly a million people across 72 countries over 12 years and harnessed actual individual usage data from millions of Facebook users worldwide to investigate the impact of Facebook on well-being.

I don't think we're going to have a small sample-size issue with this study. Indeed, the global nature of the study is useful as it gets beyond what many studies do, just looking at western college students who are readily accessible to academic researchers.

You can look at the full paper, which is interesting.

Overall, a country's per capita daily active Facebook users predicted that nation's demography-aggregated levels of positive experiences positively, and negative experiences negatively. In addition, the associations between countries were similar, but the uncertainty cutoff of 97.5% for posterior probabilities of direction was strictly only met for positive experiences (table 1). Associations between Facebook adoption and life satisfaction were less certain within countries, but stronger when comparing countries to each other. While these descriptive results do not speak to causal effects, they align with other findings suggesting that technology use has not become increasingly associated with negative psychological outcomes over time [8], and that the increased adoption of Internet technologies in general is not, overall, associated with widespread psychological harms [24]. We also found that Facebook adoption predicted young demographics' positive well-being more strongly than it did older demographics', and that sex differences in this dataset were very small and not credibly different from zero. These demography-based differences, and lack therein, were notable in light of previous literature that has reported young girls to be more at-risk of screen- and technology-based effects than young males (e.g. [27]; but see [28]). However, those studies focused on younger individuals (from 10 to 15 years old), which likely partly explains the different findings.

The authors are clear not to overstate what their paper is saying. They're not arguing that Facebook makes you happy" or anything like that. But they are saying that the evidence does not support the common refrain that it makes people unhappy.

And, in case you're wondering, the authors are also clear that while they did get data from Facebook, it was not funded in any way by Facebook, nor did Facebook have any idea what their report would show until it was published.

Again, I know that the narrative that you hear about all the time insists otherwise, but it's nice to see more data that again suggests we're living through quite a ridiculous moral panic about the new new thing, which in all likelihood we'll look back on as a silly thing, as ridiculous as moral panics about comic books, or pinball, or rock n' roll, or radio, or chess, or the waltz (all of which faced moral panics).