Facebook has published an in-depth blog post analysing whether the social networking site is actually good or bad for our mental health.
The social networking giant joined the conversation about the impact the site’s had on us after a former exec blasted the service.
Last week Chamath Palihapitiya, who was Facebook’s vice president for user growth, said he feels “tremendous guilt” for the company he helped make.
He said: “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works”.
The former Facebook exec also recommended that people that a “hard break” from social media.
And now the site which is used by more than two billion people each month has published an in-depth analysis on the effects of social media.
The blog post is entitled ‘is spending time on social media bad for us?’ and looks at the link with mental health.
Facebook said whether social media is good or bad for people depends on how it’s used.
The post was written by David Ginsberg, Facebook’s Director of Research, and Moira Burke, Research Scientist at the social networking site.
They said: “According to the research, it really comes down to how you use the technology.
“For example, on social media, you can passively scroll through posts, much like watching TV, or actively interact with friends — messaging and commenting on each other’s posts.
“Just like in person, interacting with people you care about can be beneficial, while simply watching others from the sidelines may make you feel worse.”
They said when people are passively consuming content on Facebook it can make you feel worse, whereas interacting with people improves well being.
Ginsberg and Burke said: “In general, when people spend a lot of time passively consuming information — reading but not interacting with people — they report feeling worse afterward.
“In one experiment, University of Michigan students randomly assigned to read Facebook for 10 minutes were in a worse mood at the end of the day than students assigned to post or talk to friends on Facebook.
“A study from UC San Diego and Yale found that people who clicked on about four times as many links as the average person, or who liked twice as many posts, reported worse mental health than average in a survey.”
They added: “On the other hand, actively interacting with people — especially sharing messages, posts and comments with close friends and reminiscing about past interactions — is linked to improvements in well-being.
“This ability to connect with relatives, classmates, and colleagues is what drew many of us to Facebook in the first place, and it’s no surprise that staying in touch with these friends and loved ones brings us joy and strengthens our sense of community.”
The Facebook blog post comes after Sean Parker, who was an early investor n the site, said he had become a conscientious objector” to social media.
He said that Facebook and other sites had succeeded by “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”
Parker said that Facebook provides a validation feedback loop that gets people to post over and over again to get more likes and comments.
He said: “It’s exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.
“The inventors, creators — it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”
Parker added: “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”