Close To 3,000 Facebook users were recruited via advertisements to participate in the study. The researchers then randomly selected half of these and gave them the mandate to shut down their accounts within a month’s time.
For the trouble they got paid, and the accounts were monitored to ensure that they are not used in stealth. The Messenger, however, was allowed, then it is seen as a separate function as there are plenty of counterparts.
the current answer questions about their well-being in order to then make a more comprehensive assessment when the month was over.
”Avaktiveringen showed small but noticeable improvements to their well-being, especially as I experienced happiness, life satisfaction, depression and anxiety,” the researchers write, according to The Guardian.
the Study has not yet undergone the scrutiny of research colleagues, but five independent experts give good grades to its execution to the New York Times.
” this is an impressive piece of work. Much of what we previously heard about social media’s effects have been based on surveys, ” says Erik Brynjolfsson at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to the newspaper.
on average, an hour a day on Facebook, time that now to a great extent instead was spent with friends and family.
” I was expecting a substitute to a greater extent, from Facebook to other digital things like Twitter, Snapchat, or surfing. But that was not, which was a surprise for me, ” says Matthew Gentzkow, economics professor at Stanford and one of the study’s authors, the New York Times.
from the fact that there are also positive effects with the Facebook and social media in general. Some of the participants stated that they appreciated Facebook’s advantages more after having logged out a month.
I was missing was the contact with people, of course, but also streaming via Facebook Live. Especially with the political content, where you know that others who are interested in the same thing is also watching, ” says 56-year-old Connie Graves to the New York Times.
the Reduction of awareness of the news events was also one of the negative effects of having to be logged out as it emerged in the study.
the incentive system that Facebook and other social media are structured around similar to those that can be found at for example, gambling and drug abuse. This aspect, as commented on by researchers at Stanford and NYU.
”We can see that four weeks without Facebook improves subjective well-being and significantly reduces the desire to log in again after the experiment. It suggests that forces such as addiction can make people use Facebook more than they would otherwise do”, they write.
commenting on a presstalesperson on Facebook the researchers ‘ results: ”this is one of the many studies on this topic, and should be considered just so”.
He quotes also passages from the study notes that ”discussions about social media’s drawbacks should not overshadow the fact that they satisfy a deep and widespread needs.”
