Evidence That Online Social Networks Have Negative Effects

[rhoenix]

Online social networks have permeated our lives with far-reaching consequences. Many people have used them to connect with friends and family in distant parts of the world, to make connections that have advanced their careers in leaps and bounds and to explore and visualize not only their own network of friends but the networks of their friends, family, and colleagues.

But there is growing evidence that the impact of online social networks is not all good or even benign. A number of studies have begun found evidence that online networks can have significant detrimental effects. This question is hotly debated, often with conflicting results and usually using limited varieties of subjects, such as undergraduate students.

Today, Fabio Sabatini at Sapienza University of Rome in Italy and Francesco Sarracino at STATEC in Luxembourg attempt to tease apart the factors involved in this thorny issue by number crunching the data from a survey of around 50,000 people in Italy gathered during 2010 and 2011. The survey specifically measures subjective well-being and also gathers detailed information about the way each person uses the Internet.

The question Sabatini and Sarracino set out to answer is whether the use of online networks reduces subjective well-being and if so, how.

Sabatini and Sarracino’s database is called the “Multipurpose Survey on Households,” a survey of around 24,000 Italian households corresponding to 50,000 individuals carried out by the Italian National Institute of Statistics every year. These guys use the data drawn from 2010 and 2011. What’s important about the survey as that it is large and nationally representative (as opposed to a self-selecting group of undergraduates).

The survey specifically asks the question “How satisfied are you with your life as a whole nowadays?” requiring an answer from extremely dissatisfied (0) to extremely satisfied (10). This provides a well-established measure of subjective well-being.

The survey also asks other detailed questions such as how often people meet friends and whether they think people can be trusted. It also asked about people’s use of online social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

This allowed Sabatini and Sarracino to study the correlation between subjective well-being and other factors in their life, particularly their use of social networks. As statisticians they were particularly careful to rule out spurious correlations that can be explained by factors such as endogeneity bias where a seemingly independent parameter is actually correlated with an unobserved factor relegated to the error.

They found for example that face-to-face interactions and the trust people place in one another are strongly correlated with well-being in a positive way. In other words, if you tend to trust people and have lots of face-to-face interactions, you will probably assess your well-being more highly.

But of course interactions on online social networks are not face-to-face and this may impact the trust you have in people online. It is this loss of trust that can then affect subjective well-being rather than the online interaction itself.

Sabatini and Sarracino tease this apart statistically. “We find that online networking plays a positive role in subjective well-being through its impact on physical interactions, whereas [the use of] social network sites is associated with lower social trust,” they say. “The overall effect of networking on individual welfare is significantly negative,” they conclude.

That’s an important result because it is the first time that the role of online networks has been addressed in such a large and nationally representative sample.

Sabatini and Sarracino particularly highlight the role of discrimination and hate speech on social media which they say play a significant role in trust and well-being. Better moderation could significantly improve the well-being of the people who use social networks, they conclude.

Facebook, Twitter, and others take note.

So - this study was performed in Italy, but I don't think the effects noted in the study are limited to Italy. This isn't quite so simply summarized as "anonymity + internet = raving asshole", due to the medium in question being social networking, which strongly encourages people to use their real names - but it isn't far off.

The psychological temptation to be an asshole to someone you don't know is still there, because you think you can get away with it without consequence, even with your name attached - most people assume their names would be simply lost in a sea of other voices, and so give into their impulses nearly as easily as they would if they were more anonymous.

Beyond the immediate realm of considering this an issue of internet interaction only, I think this is interesting because it shows that unconscious assumptions one has about people colliding with reality, with some interesting results.

Watching how online interactions change over time from this point will be interesting to me, especially with the other prominent collisions happening recently - most recently the threats Anita Sarkeesian received for her videos regarding the presentation of women in popular media, especially video games. To me, it shows that no matter how well-behaved in public or around people who know them these guys in question might be, they are quite willing to give into their selfish and fearful impulses, choosing to view her work as somehow a threat that must be attacked, rather than something to give them further thought about.

[General Havoc]

This is a spurious, imbecilic study, if only due to the fact that it assumes, wrongly, that social interaction is a zero-sum game, with all social network users sacrificing their in-person interactions to stare at a screen. This is like arguing that going for a walk has negative social effects because that's time you could be using to pick up girls at a bar, you loser. It also makes the mistake of deciding that social network users lack trust and positive interaction because they are social network users because they lack trust and interaction because they use social networks...

I am sick to death of "studies" that try to measure the subjective value of human interaction to a person, particularly when they lean on scare stories and tired narratives of of shut-ins to do so. I'm equally tired of people taking a single case or even a batch of them and trying to draw some judgmental conclusion about a group of people they're predisposed to dislike from it. Anita Sarkeesian was threatened. Consequently I can judge and cast aspersions upon people I happen to be predisposed to not like. How convenient for me.

Worse yet, even if the study is valid, the article is worse than useless. "Facebook, Twitter, and others take note," it says. Take note of what? That they're evil? That they're bad? That they should shut down? Please don't give me this "now you're informed card" either. They and I are informed of exactly jack shit beyond the fact that "social interaction of types I don't like is bad." We can't blame Facebook for violence the way we could video games or movies, so let's use the fact that unhappy people use them to claim that they make them unhappy. Because clearly the best thing that could happen to people who are unhappy and rely on social networks to interact with others, is for them to be cut off from what social networks they do have and left isolated and alone. But at least they won't be losers on Facebook, guys!

I've come to HATE Facebook, and yet I find this study to be a useless pile of pseudo-scientific garbage.

[rhoenix]

I was inspired to write a huge thing as a reply. It being Friday, my Blame-O-Meter suggests "late 1970's Portugese manufacturing techniques."

---

That's not at all what I took from the study, but of course, your mileage may vary. I agree that the authors of the paper added hyperbole where they shouldn't, but that doesn't detract from what I took to be the main point.

What I got from it was the difference in quality of interaction between online communication, and real-life communication. One's interactions with people in real life, face to face, have an inherently different quality than those we have with people through the Internet. One can always control one's impulses and biases with reason, of course - but it doesn't change the natural tendency for each.

Face-to-face communication, in person, where you can see the other person's body language, hear the pauses and distinct pattern in how they talk, emote, and use body language to emphasize verbal points, one is more likely to develop trust in that relationship between people. Sure, you may decide within a few seconds that someone is a jackass, but you're also more likely to develop trust/friendship with someone if you and they get along. We can discuss the nuances of social biases and such and how they tend to tinge such interactions, sure, but those are still simply modifications to the current dynamic at work.

Online interaction tends to be more literal - one cannot see the eyebrows, as it were. As a result, one tends to be less likely to volunteer personal anecdotes and such, and more likely to establish connections based on a narrower range of common interests. Someone you meet in a game that you get along with you're not especially likely to excitedly give them your contact information (online or otherwise) with; you're more likely to keep such an established relationship with that person only in the context of those common interests. Ergo, unless you and someone get along especially well, you'll likely interact only while you and that person are playing that game, or posting on the same site.

How introverted or how extroverted someone is places a bias on which kind of interaction a person is likely to gravitate towards. If one tends to be more introverted, one tends to interact with others more online than in person. This also changes the quality of communication with others online - introverts are by nature more invested in the quality of communications they have online, because it is a realm of communication they feel more comfortable with than communicating in real life. This, I'm sure, is still well within "well, duh" territory.

The conclusion that such interactions are inherently negative is the part that I think is hyperbole. Instead, I would say that one is less likely to make a close friend online than one is in real life, unless one is introverted - and even then, the quality of friendships you make in person will still tend to be closer friendships than the ones you have with people through the Internet. With enough time and familiarity of those interactions, the closeness of friendships for each realm (real-life or online) tends to even out over time, of course - but there is the initial bias toward real-life interactions nonetheless, especially with extroverts.

Considering one type of interaction negative when compared to the other is the part I think is hyperbole. However, whether you're an introvert or an extrovert, you're more likely to make a close friend in real-life than you are online. Exactly how likely is mainly determined by how extroverted or introverted a person is, of course, but I'd still state that it would be more likely for both.

Now - with all that said, what I think will be interesting to watch is to see how online communication changes over time, and seeing just how blurred the line will be between online interaction, and real-life interaction. At a certain point in the timeline of that blurring of lines, this entire thing becomes a moot point. In the meantime though, it's true - but only for the present and near future.