Participants were measurably happier and less anxious.
But, disappointingly, not by a huge margin:
Perhaps this is due to the fact a significant number of users switched to less harmful online platforms and didn’t stop using their phones.
Or perhaps there is actually something more sinister. My real concern with this study is the involvement of Meta.
We actually have evidence that Meta halted internal research about social media:
Would you study tobacco and have tobacco companies involved?
Would you study obesity and have Coca-Cola involved?
I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but could Meta actually bully/bribe Stanford in order to change the figures?
Personally I find there to be less new daily content on lemmy, so it ends up self limiting as I see the same posts again. Might just be what I’m subbed to, and or how I sort. But I do end up spending less time here than I did reddit, or I currently do on youtube.
I think it comes down to an insufficient user base than is required to get the previous fix of social media.
This was a problem in the early days of Facebook as well…