According to research published today by leading Oxford internet researchers, the largest independent scientific study ever conducted investigating the global spread of Facebook was unable to find any evidence that the social media platform’s global penetration is linked to widespread psychological harm.
The independent Oxford study, published in the Royal Society Open Science, utilized well-being data from nearly a million people across 72 countries over a 12-year period, as well as actual individual usage data from millions of Facebook users around the world, to examine the impact of Facebook on well-being.
Facebook participated in the study by providing data, but did not commission or fund the research. Researchers from Facebook assisted in ensuring the accuracy of the data, but did not influence the study’s design or have access to the findings before the Oxford team made them public.
The Oxford research project began before the COVID pandemic, and the team spent more than two years acquiring data from Facebook that was crucially required.
Existing Gallup data on well-being, covering nearly one million people from 2008 to 2019, were combined with Facebook data on global platform engagement. The team was able to see, for the first time, how the spread of Facebook engagement correlated with high-quality national well-being data.
Age and gender differences were also investigated by the researchers.
Across all well-being measures, their analysis revealed that the association between Facebook usage and well-being was marginally stronger for men than for women, but these trends were not statistically significant. In addition, Facebook adoption and well-being were generally more favorable for younger people across all countries. These effects were modest but statistically significant.
