Study: Deactivating Facebook is good for you
Around the world, more than 2.3 billion people are on Facebook, actively communicating and posting and consuming on the platform, a figure that continues to grow and drive record profits, despite a barrage of privacy scandals and heightened scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers.
People are not abandoning Facebook, according to the company’s fourth-quarter earnings. The company has reversed a troubling trend in its most important market: Facebook added users in North America for the first time all year.
But in the latest study measuring the effects of social media on a person’s life, researchers at New York University and Stanford University found that deactivating Facebook for just four weeks could alter people’s behavior and state of mind.
The study found that temporarily quitting Facebook led people to spend more time offline, watching television and socializing with family and friends; reduced their knowledge of current events and polarization of policy views; and provoked a small but significant improvement in people’s self-reported happiness and satisfaction with their lives.
Researchers also found that the deactivation freed up an hour per day for the average person. And the people who took a break from Facebook continued to use the platform less often, even after the experiment ended.
“Our study offers the largest-scale experimental evidence available to date on the way Facebook affects a range of individual and social welfare measures,” the researchers wrote.
Participants said Facebook improves their lives in clear and diverse ways, the researchers found, from entertainment, to organizing philanthropy and activism, to providing social bonds for people who would otherwise feel isolated.