The Welfare Effects of Social Media

By Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, Matthew Gentzkow. The American Economic Review, 2019

675 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The rise of social media has provoked both optimism about potential societal benefits and concern about harms such as addiction, depression, and political polarization. In a randomized experiment, we find that deactivating Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 US midterm election (i) reduced online activity, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (iii) increased subjective well-being; and post-experiment Facebook use. Deactivation reduced post-experiment valuations of Facebook, suggesting that traditional metrics may overstate consumer surplus. (JEL D12, D72, D90, I31, L82, L86, Z13)

Subfields: Communication, Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d9dca352cb57cf0b23f16d677774db76825d6487

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Communication

1. David Y. Yang
2. Leonardo Bursztyn
3. Ro’ee Levy
4. Amy C. Orben

In Political Science and International Relations

1. Ro’ee Levy
2. Gautam Rao
3. David Y. Yang
4. Leonardo Bursztyn

In Sociology and Political Science

1. David Y. Yang
2. Leonardo Bursztyn
3. Ro’ee Levy
4. Gautam Rao
5. M. Ridley
6. Amy C. Orben
7. Frank Schilbach
8. Vikram Patel

Citations in the corpus

• GDP-B: Accounting for the Value of New and Free Goods in the Digital Economy (2019, neutral): “Furthermore, many of these digital goods are also associated with externalities and a parallel stream of research is needed to explore these issues in greater detail (for example, Allcott et al. (2019) explore the impact of Facebook on subjective well-being, news consumption and political polarizati”
• Social Media, News Consumption, and Polarization: Evidence from a Field Experiment (2020, background): “I estimate an effect over two months in the spring of 2018, while Allcott et al. (2019) conduct the study over a one-month period in the fall of 2018. Furthermore, while both samples were recruited using Facebook ads, the sample compositions could still differ, for example, since Allcott et al. (201”
• Teenagers, screens and social media: a narrative review of reviews and key studies (2020, background): “Correlations and observed effects in this ballpark have been shown in meta-analytic studies considering anxiety and depressive outcomes (e.g., [28, 38, 64, 75]), but have also been found in longitudinal research [5, 22, 33, 41, 47] and experimental work [2].”
• Poverty, depression, and anxiety: Causal evidence and mechanisms (2020, background): “Recent randomized interventions show that deactivating social media accounts for 4 weeks led to 0.1 SD reductions in depression and anxiety scores ( 115 , 116 ).”
• Misperceptions About Others (2021, background): “A particularly salient environment where demand-side and supply-side forces intersect is social media, where studies have shown that content exposures could substantially affect individuals’ views toward others (Allcott et al. 2020, Bursztyn et al. 2020b, Levy 2021).”