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Facebook's Impact on Social & Emotional Wellbeing of Users: A Review

Preprint · April 2019

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.36647.29603

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Facebook’s Impact on Social & Emotional Wellbeing of Users: A Review
By Nathan J. Byrd
For Master of Studies in Social Innovation
Cambridge Judge Business School, Cambridge University (UK)
26 April 2019

Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Defining and narrowing wellbeing 3
How Facebook aims to create social value 3
Facebook use and ties to reduced wellbeing 5
Isolation and comparison 5
Bullying 8
Negative echo chambers 10
Facebook use and ties to increased wellbeing 12
Increased social capital and social support 12
Improved empathy 13
Conclusions 13
References 16

Introduction

Former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya stated in 2017 that he felt

“tremendous guilt” about his role in building Facebook, believing that it is “eroding
the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other” (Wong,
2017). Facebook “exploit[s] a vulnerability in human psychology” he said, prompting
a reply from Facebook that said the company had matured substantially since
Palihapitiya’s departure, and had done considerable research to understand the
platform’s impact on wellbeing to improve Facebook as a product (Wong, 2017). The
question remains for much of the world’s population, however: What impact does
Facebook have on our social and psychological wellbeing?

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 Social media is a trend that has swept the globe with ever-increasing pace
since the advent of internet chat rooms and instant messaging services in the mid-
1990s (The Complete History of Social Media, 2016). While a number of social
media sites have come and gone, the undisputed champion of the space is Facebook,
whose 2.32 billion monthly active users (MAU) as of year-end 2018 (Company Info |
Facebook Newsroom, no date) far outpace the rest of the industry. YouTube’s 1.9
billion MAU and WeChat’s 1.083 billion MAU come closest as of January 2019,
while all other platforms with 1 billion or more users are owned by – and integrated
with – Facebook itself, including WhatsApp (1.5 billion MAU), Facebook Messenger
(1.3 billion MAU), and Instagram (1.0 billion MAU) (Global social media ranking
2019, 2019).

Social media has been thoroughly criticized since its advent, often as a set of
tools that place far too much unmitigated power in far too few hands (Pringle, 2019).
Facebook is no exception to this, with 2018 alone bringing deep media scrutiny
around issues of privacy and data protection (Singer, 2018), user trust (Osnos, 2018),
polarization (DNN Media, 2017), political meddling (Corbett, 2018), and even crimes
against humanity (Mozur, 2018). While these debates are well-publicized and argued
both in media and governmental hearings, the unresolved dispute over Facebook’s
impact on the social and psychological wellbeing of its user base – now 30% of the
world’s population – is perhaps the most relevant and hotly debated lens with little
consensus among media and research alike. There is an open question as to whether
Facebook creates social and psychological problems, or plays a role in resolving
them.

Palihapitiya’s claims and Facebook’s response frame the core of this paper’s
analysis. Over the coming pages, I will analyze the trend of social media within the
context of the debate over Facebook’s impact on our personal wellbeing. In order to
do so, I will first define wellbeing within the context of this debate, after which I will
establish Facebook’s intended social value. With this baseline as a departure point, I
will then examine the most prevalent arguments that support both Facebook’s positive
and negative impact on wellbeing, limiting my assessment to Facebook as both the
largest and most researched platform in the world. I find through this assessment four
primary factors that determine Facebook’s impact on users’ wellbeing: who uses it,
how they engage, with whom they connect, and how Facebook polices its platform.

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Defining and narrowing wellbeing

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) presents a broad definition of

wellbeing as “what people think and feel about their lives”, including qualitative
interpretations of their relationships, mental fragility, and their experience of
emotions, with all of these rolling into a view of life satisfaction (2018). While the
CDC states there is no one metric for wellbeing, they cite three major dependencies:
health, social relationships, and access to resources (2018).

Dodge et al. add an equilibrium metric, defining wellbeing as balance between

psychological, social, and physical resources and challenges: when challenges
become greater than resources, the balance tips towards a negative wellbeing, and
vice-versa (2012). Though Facebook’s 60+ million business pages (Battisby, 2019)
indicate that it can have a substantial impact on access to physical resources, it is just
one channel among thousands for access to economic resources. Of greater concern
is users’ non-commercial use of Facebook, where the average 15-16 year old in the
UK spends nearly 2 hours daily (O’Neill et al., 2011). I will narrow my view on
wellbeing to social and psychological aspects.

Best et al. discuss both psychological and social wellbeing as correlated to

support networks, intimacy, quality of relationships, and emotional expression (2014,
p.28). The authors also point out their interconnectedness, such as a weak social
support networks causing the suppression of emotions (2014, p.28), indicating that
wellbeing, as Dodge et al. posit, is as much about balancing factors as it is about
maximizing one element.

With these findings in mind, the forthcoming analysis will reference

psychological and social wellbeing as viewed through the factors outlined both by the
CDC and Best et al., with balance as a critical metric.

How Facebook aims to create social value

In A Social Strategy, Stanford professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski provides a

framework for evaluating social media (SM), positing that SM targets two specific
social failures: “meet” failures – being unable to meet new people – and “friend”
failures – being unable to share personal information or provide and receive social
support within relationships (2014, p.2). Facebook, Piskorski posits, is a friend

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solution (2014, p.2), stating that any SM solution will provide value by overcoming
four types of “interaction costs” that cause social failure: breadth, display, search, and
communication (2014, p.10). Facebook’s strategy evolved to provide value against
all four interaction costs.

Breadth interaction costs arise when a possible beneficial interaction between

two people does not occur due to rarely crossing paths: Facebook solves for distance
and scheduling challenges, allowing people to remain connected and communicate at
all times, growing their network beyond their closest proximal friends on an open
platform (Piskorski, 2014, p.70-2).

Display interaction costs occur when people cannot communicate information

to one another, either due to economic or social barriers (Piskorski, 2014, p.75). By
providing a free platform with group and individual communication options,
Facebook combats both economic and social barriers. The passivity of posting content
and allowing others to visit your profile overcomes a social barrier of not wanting to
appear boastful, while the ability to either “like” or comment on posts, as well as send
a private message to the poster, allows for a range of social interactions that dodge
display costs (Piskorski, 2014, p.75-7).

Search interaction costs ensue when people struggle to find information about
others close to them (Piskorski, 2014, p.82). “Snooping” on others is frowned upon in
the physical world, though neighbors may regularly peek through the curtains to see
what’s going on next door: Facebook overcomes the lost value from not knowing
about each other, as well as the risk of getting caught when trying to find information,
by allowing users to gain updates and information on friends’ lives by using their
platform: interactions (i.e. notifications if someone has visited your profile) are not
displayed without an overt attempt to communicate individually (Piskorski, 2014,
p.81-3).

Communication interaction costs surface when private communication is

either too time consuming or too awkward to initiate, especially at scale with a large
number of friends. Facebook’s integration of Messenger, which allows for private
inbox communications with friends, addresses this in rather simple fashion (Piskorski,
2014, p.87). Additional layers of security, such as non-friend messages rerouting to
an “other” folder, serves to maintain intimacy within the channel.

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 Piskorski’s data also points towards the trade-offs that come with what might,
at first, appear to be universal positive value. His evaluation of competitor mixi, for
example, found that a decision to allow individuals to see who had visited their profile
meant that primarily women would view other women’s content, while on Facebook –
which does not show profile visit data – primarily men viewed women’s content
(2014, p.85). Is this the sign of an unnecessary social wall being deconstructed, or
evidence of a brand new social risk for women? It is this question of trade-offs in
value versus risk created by Facebook that I will explore more deeply in the coming
pages, using social and psychological wellbeing as a primary lens.

Facebook use and ties to reduced wellbeing

The downside associated with Facebook’s strategy to reduce social costs has
been heavily researched in recent times. Researchers have largely focused on three
categories to explore Facebook’s supposed negative impact on social and
psychological wellbeing: isolation and comparison, bullying, and negative echo
chambers.

In exploring these topics below, the following analysis finds that while
individual studies have found instances or cases of Facebook’s negative impact on
wellbeing with particular groups or sub-groups, testing these findings in a broader
context of research identifies characteristics of users and particular scenarios that
drive negative versus positive outcomes of Facebok use.

Isolation and comparison

Overcoming breadth interaction costs, while allowing users to communicate

directly with far more people, may also have a negative impact on our lives. A 2004
study of isolation in the United States, repeating a questionnaire from 1985, found
that the average American had fewer confidants in 2004 than a similar cohort 19 years
earlier (McPherson et al., 2006). While this study took place just as Mark Zuckerberg
was creating Facebook and so could not possibly reflect a Facebook-driven effect, it
did surface an interesting finding that “cell phones and the internet” seemed to
enhance contact beyond the walls of homes, but actually lowered the probability of

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face-to-face interactions taking place, and may even disrupt communication within
the home (McPherson et al., 2006, p.373).

A 2019 study focusing on “the welfare effects of Facebook” seemed to

confirm that these effects from 15 years prior may now well extend to Facebook
(Allcott et al., 2019). The authors asked a subset of subjects to deactivate Facebook
for four weeks, and studied the comparative effect against a control group. They
found within their sample that deactivation could be tied to a number of positive
outcomes, including: an increase in offline activity including face-to-face socializing,
a reduction in political polarization, and an increased sense of overall wellbeing
(Allcott et al., 2019). The increase in face-to-face socializing indicates that Facebook
use may be tied to a reduction in quality relationships, a key driver of social
wellbeing. Furthering the question of trade-offs, however, respondents also increased
their TV watching and saw reductions in their knowledge of factual news, the study
found (Allcott et al., 2019, p.1). The authors themselves cite this trade-off,
concluding that Facebook “fulfills deep and widespread need”, but that “our results
also make clear that the downsides are real” (Allcott et al., 2019, p.35). The uptake of
new technology-based entertainment – in this case television – by subjects of the
study to replace Facebook indicates that at least some negative welfare effects of
Facebook may be tied to technology-based entertainment in general.

Another possible consequence to overcoming display interaction costs is

Facebook-driven social comparison, in which users’ self-esteem is negatively
impacted by the perception of others’ lives being of higher quality than their own. A
2012 study published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Networking found that
Facebook users who had used Facebook longer were more likely to believe that
others’ lives were of higher quality, and that others were generally happier than
themselves (Chou and Edge, 2011). The study also found that individuals with
greater numbers of Facebook-only friends (i.e. had not met them offline) were more
likely to undervalue the quality of their own lives, furthering the comparison effect
with possible linkages to isolation (Chou and Edge, 2011). The study’s conclusion is
that Facebook-driven comparison of self with deceptively positive profiles harm
psychological welfare.

A 2014 study counters this finding, however, through an experiment designed

to measure the true impact of Facebook-driven social comparison. The research,

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published in Computers in Human Behavior, found Chou and Edge’s conclusions to
have ignored “the potential for social comparisons to be self-enhancing”, and used
their own objective analysis to demonstrate that self-comparison was likely to be used
as a tool for users in a bad mood to elevate themselves by seeking out “more self-
enhancing content”; said differently, they seek “downward social comparison targets”
(Johnson and Knobloch-Westerwick, 2014).

A 2013 study of Facebook’s ties to subjective wellbeing measured two

variables: point-in-time feelings, and general life satisfaction levels (Kross et al.,
2013). Carried out through five daily text messages sent to subjects, the findings of
the two-week-long study found a direct correlation between reports of increased
Facebook use, and decreased ratings for both variables at the next text message
check-in (Kross et al., 2013).

While Facebook allows immediate visual self-comparison, and can easily be

tied to social isolation, these studies do not create a causal link between Facebook,
isolation, and excessive comparison. A 2017 study of data on depressive symptoms
in middle and high school students and suicide-related outcomes from 2009-2015
found a strong link between social media use and depressive symptoms among
adolescents (Twenge et al., 2018). In-person social interaction, however, did at least
lessen – if not eliminate – the measurable negative effects of social media use.
Subjects with little in-person social interaction and substantial social media use saw
the greatest increase in depressive symptoms, and social media use directly correlated
with worsened symptoms for these subjects; meanwhile, subjects with high in-person
social interaction saw no measurable effect, either positive or negative, from social
media use (Twenge et al., 2018, p.9). These findings indicate that when social media
use supplants in-person social interaction (i.e. creates isolation), it has a negative
impact on psychological wellbeing.

The stronger links between isolation and reduction in psychological wellbeing,

however, were attributed by the study’s authors to screen time in general (Twenge et
al., 2018, p.15). The strongest positive correlations found in the study were between
electronic device use and suicide-related outcomes. TV viewing was similarly linked,
though to a far lesser degree (2018, p.12). The same findings were true for depressive
symptoms. Perhaps most indicative were even more significant negative correlations
between depressive symptoms and non-screen activities including religious services

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attendance, exercise, print media use, and in-person social interaction (2018, p.12).
As the authors write, “All activities associated with higher depressive symptoms or
suicide-related outcomes involved screens, and all activities associated with lower
depressive symptoms or suicide-related outcomes did not involve screens” (Twenge
et al., 2018, p.9).

Sequestering Facebook – or social media at large – as a causal factor in

isolation and social comparison has yet to occur. While there is some evidence
linking Facebook use to reduced wellbeing through social isolation, use case appears
as the actual determinant: in the right scenario, Facebook may have either a neutral or
positive impact on user wellbeing. As Facebook’s intent is to draw individuals into
greater screen time, however, findings in Twenge et al. does implicate Facebook as a
company in reducing psychological wellbeing of certain users.

Bullying

Search and communication interaction costs both fell with the advent of
Facebook, with users able to seek and speak with both offline and Facebook-only
friends anywhere in the world, at any time. There can be a dark side to these
interactions, however, of which one is bullying. One manifestation is in “Facebook
drilling” or “wallbanging”, in which rival gangs post on each other’s timelines to
intimidate and threaten (Singer & Brooking, 2018, p.13). Equally, it can be seen
amongst young people in more mainstream conditions (John et al., 2018), as well as
in less mainstream populations of all ages (Hu et al., 2019, p.6). In fact, a 2018 report
found that 59% of teens in the US self-report as having been victims of cyberbullying
at some point (Anderson, 2018). In the coming analysis, I find that Facebook may
offer an additional space for bullies to carry out their activities, and that platform
controls may play a permissive role.

In one longitudinal study of 765 Swiss students, researchers uncovered a link

between “cyberbullying” – that is, bullying via online platforms – and negative
psychological wellbeing indicators, particularly depressive symptoms (Machmutow et
al., 2012). While this is not surprising, it is important to understand the similarity
between traditional bullying and cyberbullying, both in terms of impact (reduced
wellbeing) and contributing factors. In a study of 495 students aged 12-19,

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researchers sought to understand the link between traditional bullying and
cyberbullying by analyzing bullying behaviors in relation to moral emotions and
values (Perren and Gutzwiller-Helfenfinger, 2012). The primary findings drew a
direct link between instances of both traditional bullying and cyberbullying to reduced
moral emotions (i.e. less guilt or remorse) as well as lesser adherence to moral values
(2012, p.207). These findings point to a need for strong moral presence in the lives of
young people to prevent such bullying, but not to Facebook for causation.

The primary divergence between traditional bullying and cyberbullying is that

cyberbullying does not require the “moral disengagement” of the perpetrator (Perren
and Gutzwiller-Helfenfinger, 2012, p.205), indicating that online bullies who cannot
watch their victim(s) suffer need not lower their moral barriers to actively and
intentionally lessen the psychological wellbeing of another person. This finding is
mirrored in a 2010 study (Pornari and Wood, 2010), which also found high levels of
correlation between traditional bullying and cyberbullying (2010, p.81). This
research posits that, in addition to cyberbullying being an easier first step than
traditional bullying, social media may actually serve as a battleground for the
continuation of offline bullying.

While Facebook and other social media may not be creating cyberbullies, it
does appear to offer an additional space for bullies, and lower entry barriers for
negative social engagement. Research points to the ability to create anonymous
profiles, as well as the absence of parental controls, in describing Facebook as a
“playground” for cyberbullies (Pornari and Wood, 2010, p.89). While education
around coping strategies and reducing harm are key recommendations across this
research, cyberbullying’s ability to produce “helplessness reactions (ignoring,
withdrawing, self-blame)” tied to symptoms of depression can stem from a perceived
lack of control over the situation, driven on by the anonymity that Facebook affords
(Machmutow et al., 2012, p.415).

Published nine and seven years ago respectively, this research is unable to take
into account Facebook’s more recent action to counteract cyberbullying. Facebook
released new features in 2018 including bulk-delete of harassing comments, an
appeals process to remove content if it is considered bullying, and anonymous
reporting of aggressors on behalf of a friend being bullied (Facebook adds new tools
to stem online bullying, 2018). Facebook also allows individuals to block others,

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preventing themselves from being mentioned, tagged, or contacted by their bully
(Bullying | Facebook Help Center, no date), and has created a Bullying Prevention
Hub, developed in partnership with the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence (Risen,
2013). While many countries have adopted laws criminalizing cyberbullying (A
Guide To Bullying Laws Around The World, 2015), the vast majority of cases
originate from fatal or offline criminal actions rather than from proactive pursuit of
reported bullies, meaning that Facebook is alone in actually policing for
cyberbullying.

Regardless of steps taken by Facebook, key portions of the population remain

at risk, including individuals with weaker social support infrastructure (Fanti,
Demetriou and Hawa, 2012, p.178). In addition, it is still very possible to create
duplicate or near-anonymous Facebook profiles in 2019, leaving open one of the core
gaps in the prevention of cyberbullying. While Facebook is not creating cyberbullies
and is taking active steps towards limiting the reach and potential impact of
cyberbullies as well as increasing the arsenal of tools to counter them, the continued
ability to act as a near-anonymous user and violate terms without real-world
repercussions leaves Facebook as a continued tool for use by cyberbullies. In this
light, it appears that Facebook’s existence in its current state does contribute to the
continuation of cyberbullying, and therefore plays a role in reducing the
psychological wellbeing of a portion of its users.

Negative echo chambers

One of the most talked-about themes in Facebook-related media since the

election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency has been the creation of political
echo chambers, or “situations where one is exposed only to opinions that agree with
their own” (Garimella et al., 2018, p.1). Researchers of late have focused on social
echo chambers, where engaging with similar opinions and emotions may have
negative consequences for both social and psychological wellbeing through a
phenomenon dubbed “emotional contagion” (Singer & Brooking, 2018, p.162).

In 2012, Facebook’s data scientists altered the content of 689,003 users’ News
Feeds to display either universally positive or negative content, and then evaluated the
change’s impact on users’ mood (Hill, 2014). This study created emotional echo

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chambers, and the results provided concrete evidence that such echo chambers can,
and do, alter behavior and mood; worse, it demonstrated that users are more likely to
succumb to negative emotions than positive, with behavioral shifts more pronounced
among the group that experienced negative emotional echo chambers (Singer &
Brooking, 2018, p.162). Chinese researchers used Twitter-like platform Weibo to
understand emotional contagion in 2013: analyzing 70 million messages between
200,000 users, scientists found that anger was the most contagious emotion, as even
those who had not previously been angry succumbed to the emotion upon being
caught in an echo chamber (Singer & Brooking, 2019, p.162).

Why is this a problem for wellbeing, since we experience negative emotions

like anger throughout our lives? In 2015, researchers found that when individuals
enter echo chambers, the longer they stay, the more negative the narrative becomes,
and therefore the angrier individuals become (Zollo et al., 2015). This prolonged
negative emotional spiral is directly linked to depressive symptoms previously cited
as tied to lesser wellbeing. While one study at least has found users’ own
confirmation bias to drive the creation of echo chambers more than content promotion
algorithms on Facebook (Vicario et al., 2016), this does not fully exonerate Facebook.
Returning to the role of anonymous accounts in the degradation of wellbeing
previously discussed (Pornari and Wood, 2010), Singer and Brooking’s exploration of
research done in the wake of the 2017 Charlottesville white nationalist protests
demonstrate how allowing a single Russian-based bot-driven account on Twitter can
promote and expand offline negative echo chambers, in this case even resulting in
death (2018, p.114-5). With similar examples from both LinkedIn and Facebook
(114), Singer and Brooking highlight the creation of echo chambers not as a Facebook
problem, but one across social media: Platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
allow bad actors – Neo-Nazis in Singer and Brooking’s example – to promote content
that creates negative echo chambers, and leads to the proliferation and even
permanence of negative emotions that can spill over, in some cases, to offline
antisocial or negative behavior (2018, p.114-5).

Considering that an increased perceived audience has been tied to an increase

in “life satisfaction and increased social support on Facebook” (Manago, Taylor and
Greenfield, 2012), there remains a risk that socially vulnerable individuals seeking
wellbeing improvements through popularity on Facebook may find this attention from

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purveyors of negative echo chambers. The above research highlights Facebook’s role
as an amplifier of social interaction among those looking for connectedness.
Individuals’ propensity to associate more strongly with negative emotions on
Facebook, however, indicates that antisocial actors may have more power on
Facebook than those that promote positive wellbeing, drawing the conclusion that a
poorly regulated Facebook may indeed have a negative impact on social wellbeing.

Facebook use and ties to increased wellbeing

Having discussed the most common claims raised in relation to Facebook’s

negative impact on wellbeing, I will now shift to the most common positive
correlations between Facebook and wellbeing in research: increased social capital and
social support, and improved empathy. The below evaluation finds that Facebook
offers users the opportunity to improve social and psychological wellbeing through
augmentation of social support networks and improved one-to-one relationships with
offline friends, though determinants of whether overall impact is positive versus
negative relate heavily to the pre-existing psychological conditions and familial
support of its users.

Increased social capital and social support

A 2010 study of 800 students in South Africa begins by demonstrating the link
between social capital and psychological and social wellbeing of both individuals and,
as a corollary, their real world communities. The researchers evaluated time spent
using Facebook as well as perceived social capital, and demonstrated a positive
correlation between time on platform and both maintenance and growth in social
capital. They also found positive correlation between low self-esteem, low Facebook
use, and less maintenance of social capital, suggesting that Facebook may actually
provide wellbeing improvement for those with low self-esteem and low life
satisfaction (Johnston et al., 2013). A study in China of Facebook-like platform
Renren found similar results, though noting a clear difference between “social” and
“entertainment” use, with only the former yielding wellbeing benefits (Wang et al.,
2014, p.229). A third study of 391 college students in the U.S. also found increases in

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subjective wellbeing among Facebook users, this time noting an increase in wellbeing
as the number of friendships grew, largely attributable to a social affirmation response
(Kim, p.362). However, the same research found strong correlation between honest
self-presentation and subjective wellbeing, reaffirming the importance of self-
disclosure in maximizing the positive wellbeing output of relationships, even on
Facebook (Kim, p.362).

These three studies provide a framework for achieving positive wellbeing

outcomes on Facebook: What the user brings (positive/negative self-esteem), how the
user presents (authentic/inauthentic), and how the user engages (social/entertainment).
While authenticity can be a trained condition and social use can be furthered through
platform infrastructure, self-esteem is often more difficult to condition and tied to age
and existing relationship quality, making it the more problematic element. Similarly,
a study of Facebook users segmented by the Ten-Item Personality Inventory (Grieve
and Kemp, 2015, p.240) found positive increases in social capital and social
connectedness correlated with greater extraversion, emotional stability, and openness
to experience, as well as the inverse for all (2015, p.241). While there is clear
evidence that Facebook creates positive social value for many, the findings here
indicate a possible rich-get-richer scenario in social terms, with more psychologically
positive and stable individuals more likely to reap positive outcomes, and vice versa.

What, then, of more socially at-risk groups? Researchers evaluating deaf and
hard of hearing (D/HH) children asked this very question, as D/HH children have
fewer and lower-quality friends. Here they compared three types of friendships –
online only, online-offline mix, and offline only – and found that both D/HH and
hearing children see the highest correlation for positive wellbeing in online-offline
mixed friendships (Blom et al., 2014, p.1). When it comes to family-based offline
social support failures instead of offline peer group isolation, Fanti et al. found a high
prevalence of cyberbullying (Fanti, Demetriou and Hawa, 2012, p.168), which I have
already tied to reduced wellbeing. Interestingly, family support also proved to insulate
children with impaired peer support (2012, p.168). Combined, these findings
establish that, while Facebook can and certainly does increase social capital and
support for many, young people with less-supportive families as well as those
exhibiting less favorable personality traits are unlikely to see wellbeing benefits from
Facebook use, and may experience the inverse.

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Improved Empathy

If echo chambers of opinion and emotion are inherently limiting and bad for
wellbeing, can instances of positive messaging create a reverse effect? One study
suggests that passive exposure to alternative cultures on Facebook can improve
positive sentiment towards those cultures (Schwab and Greitemeyer, 2015, p.102),
while a study of popular Facebook-based blog Humans of New York (HONY) found
direct ties to content engagement and measurable improvement in empathy (Wheeler
and Quinn, 2017, p.9). HONY tells the stories of every-day New Yorkers in an effort
to humanize people from all backgrounds, and it works: the study found that
Facebook-based empathy even manifested in behavior shifts – evidenced through
financial donations – and displays of outgroup inclusion (2017, p.9). Beyond the
active attempt to improve the wellbeing of others, such empathetic behaviors have
been liked in research to improved psychological wellbeing in the actor, as well
(Khajeh, Baharloo and Soliemani, 2014, p.1211), suggesting that Facebook can play a
role in improving livelihoods by committing users to positive content exposure.

Conclusions

On June 22, 2017, Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that the
company’s mission had changed to “give people the power to build community and
bring the world closer together” (Zuckerberg, 2017). This marked a shift in
Facebook’s active pursuit of a “more open and connected” world, to connecting the
world’s population in meaningful ways. In his announcement, Zuckerberg cited
research that links connectedness to wellbeing, stating that the company’s new
challenge is to rebuild broken communities and bring people around the globe into
close relationship regardless of location (Zuckerberg, 2017).

The findings of this paper largely back this shift in that positive, group-based
social engagement is critical to healthy Facebook use; however, this paper also
suggests that the path to stronger user wellbeing on Facebook relates to four major
factors.

How users engage. There is a clear positive correlation between the use of
Facebook for social engagement and positive wellbeing outcomes. Conversely,

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passive, non-communicative, and entertainment-only uses of Facebook tie to lesser
wellbeing outcomes, along with excessive screen time.

Who uses the platform. Individuals coming from situations of weaker family
support tend to experience worse wellbeing outcomes when using Facebook, as do
introverted, closed-minded, and emotionally unstable individuals. Users benefitting
from strong family support networks appear largely insulated from possible negative
wellbeing outcomes resulting from Facebook use, while extroverted, open-minded
and emotionally stable individuals tend to see wellbeing benefits from using
Facebook.

With whom users connect. The research cited in this paper clearly
demonstrates Facebook’s ability to create positive wellbeing outcomes via social
capital creation and social support improvement when the platform is used as a tool to
connect offline friends over long distances, or to further day-to-day offline
relationships. As and when Facebook furthers existing relationships, or brings
Facebook-only relationships to offline spaces, there exists a higher likelihood of
Facebook improving users’ wellbeing. Whether through selection bias or algorithmic
selection, those finding themselves in negative echo chambers will experience
strongly negative wellbeing outcomes.

How Facebook polices its platform. Poor and delayed platform regulation
appears to lead to reduced wellbeing outcomes for some users. The abuse of
anonymity or pseudonymous action appears to allow for increased instances of
bullying and negative echo chamber formation, both of which lead to reduced
wellbeing indicators.

It is clear that Facebook actively creates both positive and negative impact on
the social and psychological wellbeing of its users, and that the nature of the impact is
driven by a variety of overlapping factors. The company’s aim to create greater
connectedness among users through promoting community creation does address a
critical cause of negative wellbeing outcomes; nonetheless, how Facebook polices
those communities, whether the company chooses to actively promote positive
content, how and if it pre-empts bad actors, and if Facebook can motivate users to
actively connect online and offline community appear to be primary determinants of

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whether and how Facebook’s strategy will produce more positive wellbeing outcomes
for users than their prior strategy.

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