Disconnection: what happens when you give up on Facebook?

The first promises and enthusiasm associated with social networks - their ability to unite people around the world and inspire ordinary people to activism - gave way to fears that they drive us into depression and sow political discord more than ever before.

But is it really?
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In one of Facebook's largest social studies, Stanford economists have studied popular assumptions related to this platform and its impact on the individual and society.

Among other things, they found evidence that FB makes users less happy and more restless. But in general, according to their assessment, the emotional impact, although it does exist, turns out to be less than has been argued in other studies that insist on lowering the users' self-esteem.

Their analysis also sheds light on the influence of FB on democracy, and makes the assumption that the platform enhances political separation, while at the same time giving users information about what is happening.

The study is described in a new paper , one of whose authors was Matthew Genzhkov , a professor of economics and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Previous studies that have studied such topics have either been conducted on a smaller sample, or have concentrated on analyzing correlations, and not on a random assessment of causes and effects.

"This study suggests that the growing popularity of social networks - and especially FB - can be considered a double-edged sword," Genjkov says.

This is a reminder that such a revolutionary technology as a social network can not be completely good or bad. This is often a mixture.

“For several years, FB could not do anything bad,” says Genzhkov. - And the last couple of years, he does not do anything good. FB - either the greatest project ever created, or destroys humanity. Exactly the same dispute came after the appearance of television. We need to begin to understand the nuances of what this technology really does with the world. ”

Small but significant effect on well-being.

Genzhkov and his co-authors — Candidate Candidates Luc Bragieri and Sarah Eichmayer, as well as Hunt Alcott, an economist at New York University, have involved about 2,850 FB users from the US in the study. To participate, users were required to stay in the FB for at least 15 minutes a day. Some of the participants were added to the experimental group, whose members were offered money to disable their accounts on the eve of the mid-term elections in November 2018.

Scientists then used various metrics, including daily messages, polls, and publicly available information on voting and using Twitter, to track the behavior of both the experimental and control groups.

The team was able to study a wide range of points of influence of FB on users. The results of their work show that, on average, users who abandon FB:

• Spend less time on the Internet and get involved in a wide range of different activities, including spending time with family and friends. They do not replace FB with another networking platform, such as Twitter.
• They reported a small but significant improvement in the level of happiness in life, life satisfaction, a decrease in depression and anxiety.
• Changes in well-being occurred regardless of whether they were active or passive users. Just over a year ago, FB reported that scrolling the news feed - instead of actively participating in the social network, for example, adding comments - worsens the users' self-esteem.
• Worse oriented in current events and political news.
• They became less radical in their political views on problems.
• They began to use FB less at the end of the experiment. Four weeks after the end, users from the experimental group spent 23% less time in the FB mobile application than the control group.

Genzhkov says that these discoveries raise a number of questions about the influence of social networks on democracy. For example, would it be better if people know less about current events and are less likely to develop radical political views? Or would it be better if people are more informed, but also more fanatical and aggressive in their views?

“There is a difficult question that does not have an obvious answer,” says Genzhkov, whose research is connected with the interaction of politics and media sources.

First averaging, then details

The researchers were particularly surprised that at the end of the experiment, users did not seek to quickly return to the FB. They were more likely to remove the mobile application altogether from the phone and more reasonably approached the question of participation in the service in the future.

The results suggest that FB, as many observers have suggested, can be considered a habit that takes shape over time. The fact that users, even temporarily abandoning its use, less wanted to use it in the future, corresponds to the theories of harmful addiction, says Alcott, associate professor of economics at New York University.

The researchers also estimated the amount by which users are ready to estimate the disconnection of their account in FB before and after they took a break from using the service. They found that the median user wanted to get $ 100 to stop using FB for four weeks. After a month's holiday, the average user said that he was ready to agree to a slightly smaller amount in order to take another break.

“It turns out that a four-week break in use allows people to appreciate how they use FB, but they are still willing to pay money to stay on the platform,” Alcot says. “Economically, FB seems to be a significant value to its users.”

The study, according to Bragieri, emphasizes the nuances of the influence of social networks. For example, the fact that users who disconnected from FB knew less about what was happening indicates that the platform is a valuable source of information for people who are not interested in news through other channels.

“You can often hear that the influence of FB on politics is inherently detrimental due to the spread of misinformation and an increase in radicalization,” he says. “However, this work provides a more subtle approach to understanding what is actually happening, and this is worth considering.”

With this in mind, at the end of the experiment, researchers conduct interviews with participants to better understand the various nuances of the results. They also process data to sort by age, level of education, political ideology and other characteristics.

“Our research reports average effects, but there can be large deviations from the average for different people,” says Eichmayer. “Now that we have all the data, we can start exploring potential differences.”