via lidblog:
As someone who is regularly put in Facebook jail for BWC (blogging while conservative) a study wasn’t necessary to convince me that Facebook damaged my mental and physical health. A university study has discovered that regular use of Facebook may be detrimental to the user’s health.
Researchers from UC San Diego and Yale cooperated on a project to monitor Facebook usage of 5,208 adults over two years.
But the study’s results should be concerning to Facebook users as well as users of all social media, according to Business Insider.
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Holly Shakya, assistant professor at UC San Diego, and Yale professor Nicholas Christakis spent two years following 5,208 adults who are part of a Gallup long-term study. After asking permission, they monitored these subjects’ Facebook use directly from Facebook, rather than asking subjects to report their own use. (People often don’t realize how much time they spend on the social network.) And they checked in with subjects on their emotional and physical well-being, as well as their body-mass index (BMI), three times over the course of two years.
The scariest part of this is that based on his previous stances, Beto O’ Rourke will probably now try to take away guns from anyone who uses Facebook
As the two professors wrote in the Harvard Business Review
Overall, our results showed that, while real-world social networks were positively associated with overall well-being, the use of Facebook was negatively associated with overall well-being. These results were particularly strong for mental health; most measures of Facebook use in one year predicted a decrease in mental health in a later year. We found consistently that both liking others’ content and clicking links significantly predicted a subsequent reduction in self-reported physical health, mental health, and life satisfaction.
Our models included measures of real-world networks and adjusted for baseline Facebook use. When we accounted for a person’s level of initial well-being, initial real-world networks, and initial level of Facebook use, increased use of Facebook was still associated with a likelihood of diminished future well-being. This provides some evidence that the association between Facebook use and compromised well-being is a dynamic process.
Although we can show that Facebook use seems to lead to diminished well-being, we cannot definitively say how that occurs. We did not see much difference between the three types of activity we measured — liking, posting, and clicking links, (although liking and clicking were more consistently significant) — and the impact on the user.
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Why, it’s like social media is a virus of the mind or something — somebody should write a book about that.
h/t ED