Evidence that quitting Facebook for four weeks delivers long-term benefits.
This article was originally published on OneZero at Medium.
My screen time was up last week. Again. Along with much of humanity, staying home to avoid the coronavirus has me spending way too much time on social media.
Perhaps I should just go with the flow? Take it easy on myself while my family and I ride out this period of isolation. And while I’m at it, what’s the harm in Instagramming every cocktail I make, Tweeting every tart I bake?
The problem is that social media is eating our lives, undermining our democracies, and crowding out the time and headspace normally devoted to more worthwhile people and pursuits. Early in the isolation time, I painted three pictures, having not picked up a brush for several years. I worked hard on my touch typing, in defiance of all sorts of ‘Old dog, new tricks’ wisdom from the teenagers. Last week, however, I lapsed into Twittering Face-tube-gram torpor and all those worthy pursuits languished on the shelf.
The trouble with the younger generation
When I voice my concerns over dinner, the young people gape at me. I count that as a victory because they aren’t looking at the spot in their empty palm where their iPhones normally sit. Call me old-fashioned, but I have standards, and ‘no phones at the table’ is an absolute. But the youngsters have grown impatient with my assertions that time spent on social media is almost entirely time wasted.
As a scientist who studies human behavior, of course I go straight to the evidence. Psychologist Jean M. Twenge has made her career studying data about the differences between American generations. Her most recent efforts concern what she calls the iGen.
Born in 1995 and later, they grew up with cell phones, had an Instagram page before they started high school, and do not remember a time before the Internet.
That covers all the children in my house. Text, direct messages, and social media posts have slashed the time their generation spend with friends and family, reading, and playing sport. Generation X’ers like me recall our parents making similar complaints about television, but most parents I know would be relieved if their kids would just sit down and watch TV with them. As long as they put down their phones. So consumed are the iGen by social media that they watch less TV than the millennials and the Generation X’ers who came before them.
According to Twenge’s exhaustive analyses of the data, the time that they spend on social media has caused big spikes in iGen anxiety, depression, and suicide. The individual youngsters who spend the most time on social media and text-based interaction experience the greatest risk.
The news is not all bad. iGen don’t drink as much, they don’t have as much risky sex, and they don’t take risks with drugs and dangerous driving as much as the preceding generations. As Twenge put it in The Atlantic, today’s teens present more danger to themselves than to one another.
Since 2007, the homicide rate among teens has declined, but the suicide rate has increased. As teens have started spending less time together, they have become less likely to kill one another, and more likely to kill themselves.
What about the old(er) people?
Teenagers rightly point out that the problem of social media neither begins nor ends with them. They were too young to vote for the current crop of underwhelming blatherers in Washington, London, and Canberra. If social media, perhaps via Cambridge Analytica and some foreign agents, helped deliver Trump to the Whitehouse, and Brexit to the Brits, it was the adults who cast the ballots.
The question of whether social media has beneficial or detrimental effects on adult users has, thus far, remained far more a matter of vocal opinion than good evidence. That changed in March, with the publication of an impressive experimental study in the American Economic Review. A team of four economists from New York University and Stanford devised an ingenious experiment to measure the costs and benefits of a four-week holiday from Facebook.
The people who quit Facebook were happier, more satisfied, less anxious, and less depressed after the study.
They placed ads on Facebook to recruit Americans for a survey on “internet browsing”. Part of that study required participants to deactivate their Facebook account for 24 hours when asked. Nearly 3,000 people filled out the survey right and went through with the deactivation. The economists then figured out how much those people — who had proved themselves able to live without Facebook for a day — would need to be paid to abstain for four weeks. Most people were happy to do so for $102.
The researchers then assigned participants at random to either deactivate Facebook for four weeks leading up to the 2018 mind-term elections, or to a control group that carried on as usual. Those who deactivated Facebook spent less time online, on non-Facebook social media and other online activities. They freed up a full hour per day for other activities. With that extra time, they socialized more with friends and family, and they watched more television.
Americans get more of their news through Facebook than any other source, a fact blamed for the intense polarisation of the American polity. Study participants who quit Facebook knew less about what was going on in the news, attended less to politics, and were less politically polarized than the control group who kept their Facebook accounts active.
The people who quit Facebook were happier, more satisfied, less anxious, and less depressed after the study. This study, with its rigorous experimental design and large sample, constitutes some of the best evidence to date that Facebook use compromises mental health.
The group assigned to quit Facebook, when prompted to reflect on their experiences, were more able to articulate both the pros and the cons of social media. More than that, they voted with their feet — or at least with their phones — only using Facebook 78% as much as the group who did not quit Facebook for the study.
Facebook won’t want you to stop
Obviously, this result is not great news for Facebook, or for social media in general. It provides robust evidence that time away from the platform can have salutary effects on people’s time use, political tolerance, and mental health. It also shows that time spent away from Facebook leads to less time spent on the platform in the future.
By showing that the majority of people would forego Facebook for four weeks if paid $102 to do so, the economists also provide a sense of what users might be prepared to pay to use the platform. To be sure, it isn’t as high as $102 for four weeks. And getting people to buy this particular cow when they feel like they’ve been enjoying the milk for free might prove impossible. But people haven’t really been getting the milk for free.
Facebook embodies The Attention Merchants described by Tim Wu. Despite what advertisers might wish the public to believe, ads always impose a cost on those they target. MIT academic and Internet activist Ethan Zuckerman calls the advertising business model The Internet’s Original Sin. Internet advertising depends on gathering and using personal information and selling it to the highest-paying advertiser. As the Norwegian Consumer Council’s recent ‘Out of Control’ report showed, privacy violations and unethical sharing of user information are rampant among some of the most popular apps in use today, including some social media.
Worries about user privacy on platforms like Facebook extend to concerns that the identities of dissidents and details of political protests organized on social media might fall into the wrong hands, such as the hands of despotic regimes. So much so that public intellectuals like Zuckerman and Zeynep Tufekci have called for a subscription option for platforms like Facebook.
According to Zuckerman, Facebook makes about $2.40 profit per user per year from selling targeted ads. The new evidence suggests that people would be willing to pay far more than that for Facebook. They would probably pay even more if they appreciated just how much social media’s advertising model is costing them.
Going cold turkey on social media makes a good headline, and authors like Felicia C. Sullivan and John Gorman have quit and never looked back. Even teens, like 17-year-old Corey Simon have found that quitting social media worked for them, a fact I am hoping to bring up at the dinner table sometime soon.
The middle of a global pandemic, isolated from friends and loved ones, is really not the time for most people to quit. For many people right now, Facebook, Insta, Strava, Twitter, and TikTok are making the distancing much more social, more tolerable. Appreciating the many good things that social media have to offer, including promoting my writing to the world, I’m not quitting. But acknowledging the powerful new evidence I am also resolving to limit my time on social media and to bring that screen time measure down.
