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?
Obviously yes, because once removed from social media an individual stops being compared against and forced into FOMO.
Otherwise it takes some technical skill to curate experiences in social media, like choosing whom to actually follow and interact, keeping only truly best friends, limiting how much personal information is given to Zuck, and using plugins and scripts to control how much actual content is being shown. As someone who lived with a dumb phone for a long time until 2012, it’s disgusting but is a necessary evil I have to be on social media in some form (not using my deadname), because the majority of the clients I have to deal with are mostly on Facebook Messenger nearly all the time.