SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Insightful) by pTamok on Tuesday February 12 2019, @07:54PM (1 child)
Dumb is the state of not having a voice. Literally speechless. In earlier times, when disabled people were treated less well by society, being disabled by lack of speech was regarded as making you stupid.
To a certain extent, when so many people use Facebook to broadcast their thoughts, not using Facebook could be regarded as not having a virtual voice, so for people using Facebook, if you don't, you are dumb - they cannot hear you. This might or might not be disabling for you. I find, not being a Facebook user, that I miss out on social events organised by other people, and many businesses have Facebook presences without plain website presences, so to some extent I am disabled because I do not fully participate in general society. Of course, this is a choice I can make, which is a luxury people who are truly disabled do not have. I am voluntarily dumb to Facebook users.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13 2019, @01:31PM
the truth is what the majority believes and thus people were tied to stakes and lit on fire...