A new study from the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute has found that there isn’t any evidence to suggest that using Facebook causes a lot of psychological harm.
This study is different from what many people thought and what some earlier studies showed.
The Study’s Depth and Data
The research team looked at data from close to 1 million people from 72 countries. This data spanned 12 years.
They found that there were more “positive links” between using Facebook and feelings of well-being than negative ones.
To figure this out, they took information about well-being from Gallup and compared it with data about Facebook users.
They looked at three main things: how satisfied people were with their lives, and their good and bad psychological experiences.
It’s important to know that even though Facebook gave the researchers data, Facebook didn’t pay for the study or know what the results were before they came out.
A respected science journal also reviewed the study to make sure it was done right.
What The Researchers Said
Andrew Przybylski, a professor at Oxford University, said that the data they looked at doesn’t show that using Facebook is bad for people.
Instead, it might even be linked to feeling good. However, he also said that this doesn’t mean Facebook is definitely good for people’s well-being.
This research started before the COVID pandemic and took the researchers over two years to get all the data they needed from Facebook.
Matti Vuorre, who also worked on the study, said that their way of studying Facebook and well-being was new. He believes their findings should push more researchers to study social media in a similar way.
Comparing with Previous Findings
This new study is not the same as other studies in the past. For example, two studies from last year said that Facebook was bad for the mental health of college students in the US.
In 2021, a former worker at Facebook shared a lot of internal documents. These documents suggested that Facebook cared more about making money than keeping users safe.
This led to more calls for rules about how social media companies should work in the US. Some schools even sued big tech companies because they believe social media hurt their students’ mental health.
Meta, the company that owns Facebook, doesn’t agree with these claims. Mark Zuckerberg, who started the company, thinks that some people are trying to make Facebook look bad on purpose.
The study was published in Royal Society Open Science.
Copyright © 2023 Knowridge Science Report. All rights reserved.
