The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

This has moved heavily into group chats and I’m not sure it’s coming back.

Group chats are basically the Circles that Google+ saw the need for but could never get fully set up. A lot of people don’t want to share personal updates and photos to a broad swath of friends and acquaintances.

Meanwhile Instagram and Facebook keep evolving. Facebook is turning into a weird Reddit for older people. Instagram is turning into a hipper LinkedIn, where artists, musicians, and local businesses share career and business updates and advertise their wares.

> “…instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life…”

I’ve stopped using FB regularly, because I don’t like their feed algorithm. I don’t like the ads or the content, and I had curated it by joining local groups and BOFS. The only thing that brings me back now is the _possibility_ of a friends update.

That said, the _frequency_ of updates from friends and family will be vastly different for different people. The feed (if it speaks to you) works to regularize or smooth the frequency. I see FB’s problem and I don’t envy them. The vitality of the platform becomes precarious, and can be supplanted by some other platform with better engagement (ie TickTock).

I’m not a designer or researcher of Social Media, but I’m an emigre of sorts and not many people have that experience. The only platform all of my friends and family use are group private messages using our phones, and the most engaging chats we have are few and far between.

I think the EU should flex their regulatory muscle and forbid algorithmic feeds on by default unless the networks break european society as the US is broken.

I read Facebook with the special URL[1] that gives a traditional reverse chronological feed (plus ads, of course), but it's all my friends and family.

Unfortunately, some of my family post insane political views, usually about now in the early AM. Being told that a King of the USA and the elimination of due process are good things doesn't help my mental health.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr

Intellectually many want this. But the feed shortcuts our reptile brain and gains more engagement minutes / day. As you say, the algorithmic feed is superior for creators wanting reach, and more importantly, advertisers who want eyeballs on their ads. Due to network effects, it is likely impossible to get friends and family to join a boring and non-profit alternative.

Instead of pausing social media altogether, I recently took some time off from the endless scrolling feeds only. When returning it's so apparent how everything is bait for engagement.

The feed hijacks the human attention process on a visceral level. Either with visual stimulus that's extremely intriguing for evolved apes like us (cutting a cake that looks like a dog), or by activating an emotional response from a tribal species like us (stupid takes on politics, in- and out-group stuff).

The rest of most social media apps is fine and offers much of what you are asking for.

You're talking about something exactly like the ‘Moments’ of WeChat, China's largest social media. It doesn't have a feed, but only updates from friends and family. But still, people spend so much time on that - 900 million people spending an average of 1 hour and 42 minutes per person per day.

From Feeds in the sidebar, select Friends.

https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr

Instagram used to be closer to this when they showed posts in chronological order. Of course, Facebook got to work and ended this by showing posts in algo-sorted order, added an explore page, and even started showing non-followed people's viral content on the main feed. So unfortunately the trend has been a slow frog-boiling march towards engagement and enshittification.

In the meantime, maybe I should just share more photos in the group chat instead...

> As our kids get older especially, almost all of their social activities are somehow tied to social media one way or the other: no matter what they're joining, minimally there's a WhatsApp group.

That is by design. To privatize public spaces and control what is said in that spaces to monetize it is the goal. No individual parent can fight the power of the corporations that push us in that direction.

The public discourse of TV and other media is dying, while the private echo chambers owned by corporations are increasing. That is not good either.

What I think the study is missing is the impact of social media on society, and impact on society on individuals wellbeing. I see an increase in paranoia, extremism, pessimism, etc. caused directly by that closed communities that spin out of control and create the perfect dish plate to grow the most paranoid people. For kids and teenagers it will be worse, as they are still growing and learning.

I'd still not class WhatsApp as a social media platform as your story implies. It is a communication tool for the most part with some social features slowly being baked in. The downsides you're speaking of are far more applicable to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and similar, more than WhatsApp, Telegram, or Discord.

I don't know where you're based, but in general these days at least one "chat app" of some kind is the de facto standard in most countries. For a lot of the world, that's WhatsApp.

The US is an outlier in still relying majorly on SMS as the communications platform.

I feel your point but I don't think WhatsApp counts as social media. It's a group messaging app, same as Facebook Messenger, Signal, etc. Those messaging apps don't have the typical social media downsides -- you don't need to maintain a profile, there's no doom scrolling, etc.

I think the problem are not group chats, but algorithms optimizing for engagement, and therefore for outrage. Think of the facebook feed.

It's not that bad or that hard to avoid social media. I'm in my early twenties and never had much social media. You're right in that WhatsApp is almost everywhere (in certain countries) and hard to avoid. But WhatsApp is still a messaging app and not as bad as Instagram, TikTok etc. I'd say, use something like Signal for all your close communication with family and close friends. If those are close friends I'm sure they'll use Signal to communicate with you too. I guess keep WhatsApp installed but use it only for those groups and not really for any personal chats.

As for the really attention grabbing social media like Instagram and TikTok, if your kids want to get on there I'd say provide a good alternative. Something they can use or open if boredom strikes, because there definitely are those moments when that happens and one just grabs the phone. For me it's mostly been HN and books, some YouTube channels with NewPipe and some podcasts.

I never used any "social media" besides the instant messengers. I try to minimize WhatsApp in favor of better options. It's a constant, uphill battle. I feel that dating is impossible w/o WhatsApp, if you exchange phone numbers with someone at a bar, it's completely useless if you can't contact them on WhatsApp afterwards. Almost nobody (at least here in central Europe) has any other messenger, and every other avenue of contact would be either considered very pushy (like calling) or from the 90s (like SMS).

Taking part in group events also becomes a headache if you don't join the related WhatsApp group.

I find it appalling that basic features of human social functions are subject to the whims and profiteering of a quasi-monopolist company. There should be heavy regulations, at the very least.

Social media (and apps like WhatsApp) have basically become the new default infrastructure for everyday communication, and opting out can unintentionally make you feel like you're opting out of life, especially when it comes to your kids' social circles.

I see the opposite trend, as the (imo much needed) shock from Jonathan Haidt's 'The Anxious Generation' is only starting to really resonate in the minds of educators and parents.

No smartphones allowed at school, strict usage limits for older kids at home, etc.

I think Substack fills that gap for me. If you haven't already explored it then by the sounds of it I think you'd like it.

It functions more as a platform for blogs, but if you use the app there are blog-specific group chats, you can follow people, and the home page contains 'notes' that are pretty tweet-like in format. Once you have a collection of say 15-20 blogs that your subscribed to I found that the notes I got recommended were quite good and could spark some interesting conversations.

A few tech related ones I like are The Pragmatic Engineer, ByteByteGo, Bad Software Advice, and Exponential View.

> Genuinely this has had a very negative effect on me

I think that's an issue. I totally see why you were negatively impacted but I think we tend to forget it is not real life and in 99% of cases not important conversations/debates we are having with random people on the internet - they could be fun to have (or not) but important they are not. We treat social media popularity as if it is part of our identity, as if its almost as important as actual family and friends - and it really isn't.

> I have presences on Mastodon and Bluesky, but my follower count on both remains in the low teens.

I've been on Bluesky for a few months.

Around 300 followers, mostly generic female names being caricatures of progressive or traditional values, often "looking for true love".

I can post almost anything I want and no one reacts.

My sense is that Twitter’s fall was an opportunity for a lot of people to just drop out. I know for me it’s become a very occasional thing and neither Bluesky nor Mastodon ever achieved critical mass. As far as I’m concerned the format is largely done.

Never engaged with the political stuff.

Try Lemmy, not sure about the whole "followers" count but you can do exactly what you've described on Lemmy today on any topical community or AskLemmy to get you started. You can ask or start basically any kind of conversation you want and gets very decent engagement

That era of Twitter where you could toss out a random thought and instantly end up in a rabbit hole with strangers who knew stuff...

Ditto. 100%. Touché

This has been my experience as well. I was a heavy lurker during peak Twitter phase, but I still got lots of value from it.

I tried posting about tech and stuff and there’s absolute silence. No one cares anymore as if there are only tumbleweeds out there.

I logged out of all my social media accounts (except HN) and moved them to hidden apps category. As a result I managed to read 3 lovely books and finished my side project ever since.

Probably at some point soon social media companies will recognise this and provide everyone with very nearly human-like bots that engage happily with your content. This will probably be even more addictive than their previous products.

I think this is an important and often overlooked phenomenon actually. Studies of Internet engagement are filled with these skewed distributions that follow something like a Pareto principle, or I've heard it termed the 90-9-1 distribution in engagement where 90% of users just lurk a bit, 9% contribute casually, and then 1% are contributing like half of the content on the platform.

It would follow logically that whatever kind of brain rot social media causes, would affect 1% of the population very dramatically, another 9% somewhat more noticeably, and then there would be this vast ocean of people who are only marginally aware/affected. From the perspective of online activity they appear to not even exist.

This always seems counterintuitive to the 9% or the 1% (and just by commenting we're already in one of those demogs). But there's lots of data out there supporting these skewed distributions in online activity.

I’d be interested in the results of a study that cuts out all social media, but the problem I can already see with that is self-selection bias (the people that would volunteer for it are probably already eager to get away from social media so the results would likely be skewed).

Personally I’ve been mentally in a better place since getting rid of my social media accounts during COVID, but it does cause problems because Facebook has become a utility as well (schools and real-life social groups use it for co-ordinating activities).

> The surprise here is how little of an effect it has [..] measured during elections, when the effect is likely to be greatest.

If you were depressed because of divisive politics on social media, then you leave social media during elections where divisive politics is everywhere in the real world anyway.. self-reported depression seems like it would not change much. So the results might make sense as long as they are targeting people that are old enough to be depressed by politics in the first place, and assuming politics rather than body-image issues etc is the main driver.

Some follow up questions.. does social media make divisive political issues in the real world worse? Seems like it! How old is old enough to be depressed by politics? Probably everyone now, which phenomenon is also likely caused by social media. Honestly regardless of elections, you can't actually leave social media by leaving social media anymore, it's kinda in the very fabric of things.

> my next [admittedly rather cynical] thought is "who funded this?")

Same, I mean this seems to be going against most of the other research on this. For what it's worth, here's a paper with some of the same authors on digital addiction ( https://www.nber.org/papers/w28936 ). Abstract states that

> Looking at these facts through the lens of our model suggests that self-control problems cause 31 percent of social media use.

So.. not necessarily painting social media as wonderful. Social media companies would be interested in research about social media addiction for obvious reasons, but probably do not in general want that research public. Unless of course it hurts competitors more than it hurts them, and this paper is in the middle of drama about a tiktok ban. Maybe the authors just say what people in power want to hear at the time?

Maybe social media usage is a symptom of unhappiness and not the cause?

> The fact that less than one percent of the people who were invited to the study completed the experiment underscores that one should be cautious in generalizing results outside our sample. Most of this sample selection is driven by the fact that only a few percent of people click on research study invitations or social media ad

The self selection bias in these ad based invitation studies is just out of whack.

I suspect that those who participate were already considering quitting.

Removing one dopamine addicting and cortisol antagonising source might just be replaced by more of all the other sources that are being consumed. Perhaps they just watched TV news more, for example?

But perhaps the study shows that the effect works in the right direction even if small and even when replaced by any other behaviours that cause unhappiness, depression and anxiety.

> Kinda crazy that the magnitude is so small! (my next [admittedly rather cynical] thought is "who funded this?")

If a significant part of someone's Social life is run through Facebook, it's surprising that there's even a net positive in the end.

I think the below poster got it right. Cutting out Facebook certainly improved my life; cutting out instagram later was an additive improvement. Now I’m left with HN (which generally avoids the bad parts of social media) and Reddit (which has plenty of brain rot).

It also took a lot more than 6 weeks to get acclimated to it. You get psychological withdrawal. It took months for it to feel normal. My income went up a lot in the years after as well (in part due to more time to focus on finding a new job), so that also contributed to my happiness.

Depends on what you do on Reddit.

Politics, relationships, those are not things to talk about. But being able to respond to major FOSS contributors, that I'll do.

I've done the same with HN, somewhat. I log out by default, just to add a barrier between reading something and responding to it. Has to be something I really feel I must reply to or worth adding more information to, to make me log in.

I used to edit Wikipedia and I was heavily involved in many, many disputes. And in fact, I would seek out disputes, even ones outside my topic area; it's not difficult to do on Wikipedia because there are entire notice boards where people go to have public disputes. We called them "dramaboards", especially the admins' disciplinary ones.

And I would have these disputes, of course, over utterly trivial things, like how to spell something or where to place the apostrophe, or some manual-of-style nitpick in an infobox. And the disputes would drag on for weeks and we could utterly stall the editing process by disputing on talk pages. And yet we could edit-war over it, usually in slow-motion. And often the dispute would be couched in quite polite language but I would hate the guys' guts.

And the tipping point came when I began to have dreams about Wikipedia, and I would wake up angry. I would wake up fighting. I would wake up and immediately tear into the web browser and catch-up on the discussion, or not, just to post my next riposte, because I'd composed it in my sleep, in my dreamless dreams.

And I woke up angry more often than waking up in any other mood. And I was telling my psychiatrist this, and she said I should probably stop looking at blue light before bedtime. And I was incredulous that she would think if I turned my arguments red-hued that they would anger me less, or cause me to wake up happy and agreeable or something?

And I know I wasn't taking enough medication to make anyone happy, but these guys on Wikipedia really knew how to piss me off, and if you've ever heard of "brinkers" it's a certain type of troll who will play by the rules, and basically trigger anyone with a hot temper, and that triggered person would forget their ethics and commit a fatal error, and get banned, and the brinker would go on to live another day and cause others to fall into similar traps. And many of us do that, if we have the volatile temperament. I lasted about 17 years on Wikipedia without a single block and with some low-grade warnings, but generally a clean discipline record, but finally it got to me.

And a lot of time on Wikipedia I had spent fighting trolls and vandals and very disruptive editors. And I made sure a lot of them were banned. I filed a lot of reports. I was a petty bureaucrat there, filing reports and compiling evidence and arguing cases. There was no shortage of "wikilawyering". From the very beginning I was finding disputes and diving into them. Especially when they didn't concern me, didn't concern any topic I cared about. Just to have the disputes.

And I kept waking up angry. And finally I got control of that. Nowadays I wake up frightened. I wake up traumatized. I wake up scared of something I dreamed about. It's spiritual torment, and it's attributable to nothing I did the night before. Perhaps the F.U.D. of Hacker News gets to me. But not on that level. At least I don't go on crusades or jihads against Wikipedia editors anymore.

I think the trap is that many social platforms were genuinely fun, but then became a disaster

Same with stopping replyhing to HN. I just downvote and upvote. Emotional stress significantly reduced.

tbf, I think pre-AI social media will barely receive a paragraph in a 2075 history book.

Hope you are right but I think it's different. Smoking has very visible side effects fairly soon though- types of cancer, photos of rotten lungs and throat everywhere on cigarette packs etc.

Social media only seems to have psychological side effects which aren't as openly visible to our eyes.

No. It is like alcohol: perfectly fine in reasonable doses, but harmful to people that get addicted.

[dead]

There's something about the social media influencer industrial complex that short circuits women's brains worse, as far as I can tell. Most of my friends quit social media years to a decade ago but our wives are all on it. Men seem to get sucked into Youtube wormholes instead.

I think the only way out is cold turkey. The number of conversations my wife starts with telling me about some distant acquaintances recent vacation (as seen thru IG) is distressing.

My "social" internet use is more hobby based - forum/reddit hobby focussed content.

You're enabling it by being kind. Stop being so nice.

If she tried to reduce it she wouldn't do it. Nobody is holding a gun to her head. She does it because she wants to do it. Until she takes responsibility for her actions she will not change.

From the paper PDF (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w33697/w336...):

> We estimate that users in the Facebook deactivation group reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness, anxiety, and depression, relative to control users. The effect is statistically distinguishable from zero at the p < 0.01 level, both when considered individually and after adjusting for multiple hypothesis testing along with the full set of political outcomes considered in Allcott et al. (2024). Non-preregistered subgroup analyses suggest larger effects of Facebook on people over 35, undecided voters, and people without a college degree.

> We estimate that users in the Instagram deactivation group reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement in the emotional state index relative to control. The effect is statistically distinguishable from zero at the p = 0.016 level when considered individually, and at the p = 0.14 level after adjusting for multiple hypothesis testing along with the outcomes in Allcott et al. (2024). The latter estimate does not meet our pre-registered p = 0.05 significance threshold. Substitution analyses imply this improvement is achieved without shifts to offline activities. Non-preregistered subgroup analyses suggest larger effects of Instagram on women aged 1824.

>Getting myself out of shitty platforms and community spaces improved my mental state significantly

True. I've experienced it too

It means that there is a statistically significant improvement, but that improvement is tiny, and will not make you happier than your peers all by itself (assuming a standard peer group of 200 people - you'd likely swap places with 1 or 2 people).

Of course, this study only considered normative people, not marginalized or those who were experiencing active harm from exposure to social media - your personal results may vary and it's important to remember that science is imperfect and social sciences are doubly so.

If going off Facebook improves your life - you do you.

If I understand you, just read the paper for its analysis and interpretation of those numbers.

Alternatively, you'll want to grasp the meaning of "standard deviation" (you're right that you can't multiply all standard deviations by a number and get a percentage - and a percentage of what?), and then find the "index of happiness, depression, and anxiety" they use and grasp its meaning.

Even if it's statistically significant, it's a laughably tiny effect.

Like have one nice meal or a one walk in the woods 2 months ago and rate your mood today kind of effect size.

0.06 std deviation is not anything to write home about and really doubtfully real, given the general quality of psychological science.

Perhaps, how much better of a day would you have if you found a dollar on the ground.

Also fb and instagram are just two of many social media platforms, so this study doesn’t sound like a full cold turkey test.

How is traditional news "inescapable"? You can just not go to the websites and not watch it on TV. It is very easy not to consume breathless mainstream media rubbish.