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Quitting Facebook Might Make you Happier, but Dumber: Study:
Those who managed to abstain from Facebook had at least one hour or more of extra free time and reported marginally better moods, though, notably, not enough to support the theory that heavy social media use makes people miserable. They were also five to 10 percent less polarized on political issues than their control group who remained on Facebook throughout the study.
But when it came to factual knowledge of current events — the Facebook-breakers scored lower than they had prior to deactivation.
Abstract:
The rise of social media has provoked both optimism about potential societal benefits and concern about harms such as addiction, depression, and political polarization. We present a randomized evaluation of the welfare effects of Facebook, focusing on US users in the run- up to the 2018 midterm election. We measured the willingness-to-accept of 2,844 Facebook users to deactivate their Facebook accounts for four weeks, then randomly assigned a subset to actually do so in a way that we verified. Using a suite of outcomes from both surveys and direct measurement, we show that Facebook deactivation (i) reduced online activity, including other social media, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (iii) increased subjective well-being; and (iv) caused a large persistent reduction in Facebook use after the experiment. We use participants' pre-experiment and post-experiment Facebook valuations to quantify the extent to which factors such as projection bias might cause people to overvalue Facebook, finding that the magnitude of any such biases is likely minor relative to the large consumer surplus that Facebook generates.
Reference:
Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, and Matthew Gentzkow,
The Welfare Effects of Social Media (pdf); National Bureau of Economic Research.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Tuesday February 12 2019, @06:59PM (5 children)
There's also the point that not all current events are worth knowing. Sometimes they're just drivel, like what the latest Kardashian is feuding about with some other random famous person. Sometimes the current event has no effect based on distance -- what the weather is like in Seattle today is not going to impact the daily lives of the vast majority of people in Miami. Nor is political snark and/or smear campaigns affecting a politician in a distant state, going to have any meaningful effect on the lives of people in other states.
Knowledge of all these types of current events isn't really the mark of being better informed, it is the mark of being up to date on the latest trivia.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @08:46PM (1 child)
I'm pretty much up to speed about current events without Facebook. Current events right here is me drinking beer and reading Soylent, post-poning doing some code because I got past the fun part of it.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday February 13 2019, @05:32PM
You too, huh?
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by inertnet on Tuesday February 12 2019, @09:49PM (1 child)
I wanted to make a similar comment, but you did it better than I could, so I'll just add this:
All that latest trivia even keeps you away from learning things that are worth knowing.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Wednesday February 13 2019, @03:35AM
Yeah...too much info pushes out important stuff in your brain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNeWZwUn3x0 [youtube.com]
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday February 13 2019, @03:03AM
Reminds me of a book I happened upon about 20 years ago entitled How the News Makes Us Dumb.
I haven't looked at it in decades, so maybe it isn't as good as I remember -- but it not only argued that news media mostly was obsessed with meaningless trivia on most days, but that the very need to continuously produce "news" leads to oversimplifications, artificial exaggerations, and less in-depth engagement with nuances. It's thus not surprising for example that Facebook users are both more up on current trivia but also more polarized: polarization is a direct result of the oversimplification used in news media articles that are forced to reduce just about any issue to two simple "sides" which are pitted against each other.
I ignore the vast majority of "news" stories myself -- and the ones I choose to engage with, I tend to dig deep into the issues, rather than accepting the superficial spoonfed crap you tend to see in the "news."