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Thinking of Quitting Facebook?

Article in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking · April 2017

DOI: 10.1089/cyber.2017.29068.bkw

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 CYBERPSYCHOLOGY, BEHAVIOR, AND SOCIAL NETWORKING
Volume 20, Number 4, 2017
ª Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
DOI: 10.1089/cyber.2017.29068.bkw
Thinking of Quitting Facebook?
Brenda K. Wiederhold, PhD, MBA, BCB, BCN
D oes quitting Facebook lead to higher levels of well-
being? A recent study reported in this journal1 found
that to be true for >1,000 Facebook users (86% women)
in Denmark, half of whom stopped using the social media for
1 week. Those who stopped using Facebook scored more
Downloaded by Professor Dr. brenda wiederhold from www.liebertpub.com at 08/03/18. For personal use only.
highly on life satisfaction and had more positive emotions.
This was especially true for heavy users, for those who have
Facebook envy,a and for passive users.
These results are similar to those of a recent study of 381
Facebook users in Poland, in which researchers divided the
group into ordinary, intensive, and addicted Facebook users,
using tools such as the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale.2
Facebook addiction was negatively related to life satisfaction
and positively related to lower self-esteem. The results indicate
that intensive Facebook use ‘‘is negatively related to satisfac-
tion with life.’’ Ordinary users were statistically different from
both intensive and addicted users in both life satisfaction and
self-esteem, and they didn’t have a problem quitting Facebook.
What prompts one of Facebook’s 1.86 billion users3 to
quit? One U.S. (Californian) study of >500 Facebook users
showed that guilt feelings about using the social medium,
plus a feeling of self-efficacy related to the Web site, were
drivers that helped users decide to quit.4 An earlier study of
>400 users, mostly academics, revealed a variety of reasons
for quitting Facebook: ‘‘privacy, data misuse, productivity,
banality, addiction,5 and external pressures.’’6
Another study in this journal7 compared >300 Facebook
quitters with an equal number of users, and found that quitters
were more concerned with privacy and more conscientious
than users. Quitters also had higher Internet addiction scores.
Toward the end of the 2000s, so-called virtual or digital
identity suicide was popularized by researchers such as Finnish-
born Tero Karppi (https://terokarppi.com/). In one paper,8 he
approached the problem of leaving Facebook by focusing on
two art projects: www.seppukoo.com/, which created a per-
sonalized memorial page and sent it to all of a user’s Facebook
friends; and Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, which removed private
content and friendships but did not delete accounts. Facebook
blocked the former and there is no longer a Web site for the
latter after Facebook lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter.
Those who choose to quit don’t find it easy to leave.9 Fa-
cebook makes it intentionally difficult to delete a user profile,
and a user who wants to leave must dedicate a lot of time and
button clicking to make it happen. A user who begins this
process receives a suggestion merely to deactivate the account,
so that Facebook can still use the data in its aggregate reports.
Those who take a Facebook sabbatical may find that
substituting phone calls to close friends reveal what is really
going on with them, as did this Wired reporter10: he ‘‘spoke
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EDITORIAL
to a friend who was thinking about leaving a relationship,
and another whose father was very ill,’’ and as a result felt
more connected. Whether you quit Facebook completely or
simply take a social media break, chances are that you will
feel better for doing so.
Note
a. The feeling you get when you come across an old
friend on Facebook and realize that their life turned out
way better and is more interesting than yours. Source:
urbandictionary.com.
References
1. Tromholt M. The Facebook experiment: Quitting Facebook
leads to higher levels of well-being. Cyberpsychology, Beha-
vior, & Social Networking 2016; 19:661–666.
2. Błachnio A, Przepiorka A, Pantic I. Association between Face-
book addiction, self-esteem and life satisfaction: a cross-sectional
study. Computers in Human Behavior 2016; 55:701–705.
3. Statista. Number of monthly active Facebook users worldwide as
of 4th quarter 2016 (in millions). www.statista.com/statistics/
264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/
(accessed Feb. 9, 2017).
4. Turel O. Quitting the use of a habituated hedonic information
system: a theoretical model and empirical examination of Face-
book users. European Journal of Information Systems 2014; 1–16.
5. Young KS. Internet addiction: the emergence of a new clinical
disorder. CyberPsychology & Behavior 1998; 1: 237–244.
6. Baumer EPS, Adams P, Khovanskaya VD, et al. Limiting, leav-
ing, and (re)lapsing: an exploration of Facebook non-use prac-
tices and experiences. Paper presented at CHI (ACM SIGCHI
Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems) 2013,
April 27–May 2, 2013, Paris, France. https://pdfs.semantic
scholar.org/898e/859354b20a599e1ba344d69a0365d6d8941a.
pdf (accessed Feb. 9, 2017).
7. Stieger S, Burger C, Bohn M, et al. Who commits virtual
identity suicide? Differences in privacy concerns, Internet ad-
diction, and personality between Facebook users and quitters.
Cyberpsychology, Behavior, & Social Networking 2013; 16:
629–634.
8. Karppi T. Digital suicide and the biopolitics of leaving Face-
book. Transformations 2011; 20.
9. Delsing K. Post mortem: how to quit Facebook (or make it quit
you). http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/blog/2015/10/16/post-
mortem/ (accessed Feb. 9, 2017).
10. Hempel J. Why I quit my Facebook quitting. Sept. 20, 2015.
www.wired.com/2015/09/quit-facebook-quitting/ (accessed Feb. 9,
2017).
Brenda K. Wiederhold
Editor-in-Chief