Tuesday, November 13, 2018

There’s more evidence Facebook can make you feel lonely

Eleven months ago, Facebook published what I then called the most extraordinary blog post in its history: an acknowledgement that, in some cases, using social media can make you feel worse about yourself. The post was based on a survey of recent academic research on the platform, which found that certain forms of mindless thumb-scrolling could be alienating.

Facebook’s proposed solution was not to use social media less, necessarily, but rather to use it differently. What followed over the next year was a series of steps designed to get people to use Facebook more “actively” — increasing the number of comments, while decreasing number of stories and videos from professional publishers in the News Feed.

Little follow-up research on the...

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