University of
California, San Diego
Is social media good
for you, or bad? Well, it's complicated. A study of 12 million Facebook users
suggests that using Facebook is associated with living longer -- when it serves
to maintain and enhance your real-world social ties.
Oh and you can relax
and stop watching how many "likes" you get: That doesn't seem to
correlate at all.
The study -- which the
researchers emphasize is an association study and cannot identify causation --
was led by University of California San Diego researchers William Hobbs and
James Fowler, collaborating with colleagues at Facebook and Yale. It is
published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The research confirms
what scientists have known for a long time about the offline world: People who
have stronger social networks live longer. And it documents for the first time
that what happens online may matter also.
"Interacting online seems to be healthy when the online activity is moderate and complements interactions offline," said first author William Hobbs, who worked on the study as a UC San Diego doctoral student in political science and is now a postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern University.
"It is only on the extreme
end, spending a lot of time online with little evidence of being connected to
people otherwise, that we see a negative association."
Senior author James
Fowler, professor of political science in the UC San Diego Division of Social
Sciences and of global public health in the UC San Diego School of Medicine,
said, "Happily, for almost all Facebook users, what we found is balanced
use and a lower risk of mortality."
The researchers
matched California Facebook users with vital records from the California
Department of Public Health. To preserve privacy, after being automatically
matched on name and birthdate, the data was de-identified and aggregated. All
analyses were performed on the aggregate data, and all data was observational.
The researchers
studied counts of online activity over six months, comparing the activity of
those still living to those who had died. All of those studied were born
between 1945 and 1989, and all the comparisons were made between people of
similar age and gender.
The first finding is
that those who are on Facebook live longer than those who are not. In a given
year, the average Facebook user is about 12 percent less likely to die than
someone who doesn't use the site.
But that's the researchers' crudest measure,
they note, and may be due to social or economic differences between the user
and non-user groups.
Among people who do
use Facebook, the researchers looked at numbers of friends, numbers of photos
and status updates, numbers of wall posts sent and messages sent, to see if
people who were more active lived longer. In these comparisons, they controlled
their analysis not only for age and gender but also relationship status, length
of time on Facebook, and smartphone use (a proxy for income).
People with average or
large social networks, in the top 50 to 30 percent, lived longer than those in
the lowest 10 -- a finding consistent with classic studies of offline
relationships and longevity.
Those on Facebook with
highest levels of offline social integration -- as measured by posting more
photos, which suggests face-to-face social activity -- have the greatest
longevity. Online-only social interactions, like writing wall posts and
messages, showed a nonlinear relationship: Moderate levels were associated with
the lowest mortality.
Because the
researchers were studying an online social network, they could also look at the
direction of friendship requests. It was Facebook users who accepted the most
friendships who lived the longest. There was no observable relationship for
those who initiated the most. This finding was a little disappointing, the
researchers note, because it suggests that public health interventions urging
people to go out and try to make more friends may have no effect on health.
Does it also suggest
that being "popular" makes you live longer? Maybe. According to both
Hobbs and Fowler, it's hard to say which way that goes. It could be that
individuals who are more likely to live longer are more attractive to others in
the first place. That, as they say, needs more research.
"The association
between longevity and social networks was identified by Lisa Berkman in 1979
and has been replicated hundreds of times since," said Fowler.
"In
fact, a recent meta-analysis suggests the connection may be very strong. Social
relationships seem to be as predictive of lifespan as smoking, and more
predictive than obesity and physical inactivity. We're adding to that
conversation by showing that online relationships are associated with
longevity, too."
The researchers would
like to see their associational study, like Berkman's seminal one, inspire many
follow-ups. They hope that subsequent research leads to a better understanding
of what kinds of online social experiences are protective of health.
"What happens on
Facebook and other social networks is very likely important," Fowler said.
"But what we can't do at this time is give either individual or larger
policy recommendations based on this first work."
