International Day of Happiness

  Heavy users of social media are at risk, especially in English-speaking countries and Western Europe. In North America and Western Europe, young people are much less happy than 15 years ago. Over the same period, social media use has greatly increased. Many people blame social media for this fall in happiness, but does this hypothesis stand the test of rigorous scientific analysis? What about the rest of the world, where young people’s happiness has not declined relative to adults, even though social media is equally prevalent? There has been much research on this topic. This report does not attempt a comprehensive synthesis of the academic literature – for that, we refer you to the studies listed at the end of this chapter.1 Instead, we started by asking two leading critics of social media, Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch, to lay out their case (see Chapter 3). They offer two main types of analysis. First, they report what young people, their parents, their teachers, and employe...

  The relationship between social media and happiness is contingent upon both platform design and the broader cultural and social context in which social media use takes place. Key Insights  Trends in global happiness  • Nordic countries lead the happiness rankings once again. Finland is still in a group of one at the top, followed by a group of three: Iceland, Denmark, and Costa Rica. Sweden and Norway complete the top six, followed by the Netherlands, Israel, Luxembourg, and Switzerland to round out the top ten. Costa Rica’s rise to 4th marks the highest ever ranking for a Latin American country. • Looking at changes in happiness from the 2006–2010 base period to 2023–2025, there are more countries with significant gains (79) than with significant losses (41), among the 136 countries ranked. • Within that period, most of the 21 countries that have gained a point or more on the 0–10 life evaluation scale are in Central and Eastern Europe, reflecting the convergence in E...

So where do digital media products fall on this spectrum? Are they more like bicycles or guns? Key Insights  Is social media use reasonably safe for children and adolescents ? We call this the “product safety question”, and we present seven lines of evidence showing that the answer is no. The evidence of harm is found in: 1) surveys of young people; 2) surveys of parents, teachers, and clinicians; 3) contents from corporate documents; 4) findings from cross-sectional studies; 5) findings from longitudinal studies; 6) findings from social media reduction experiments ; and 7) findings from natural experiments. We show there is now overwhelming evidence of severe and widespread direct harms (such as sextortion and cyberbullying), and compelling evidence of troubling indirect harms (such as depression and anxiety). Furthermore, we show that the harms and risks to individual users are so diverse and vast in scope that they justify the view that social media is causing harm at a popul...

The key point is that many social media users wish the Social Media platforms they use did not exist and would even be willing to pay to put it out of existence. Key Insights  Three empirical studies raise serious doubts about whether social media use makes people happy , with implications for valuation, choice, and well-being. The central conclusion is that many people use social media because other people use social media. If social media use were somehow reduced or even stopped, many people would be better off , and they are aware of that fact.  The first study finds that people are willing to pay far less to use  Social Media platforms  than they would demand to stop using them. The fact that people would pay little or nothing to use such platforms raises the possibility that many think they are wasting time when doing so .  The second study finds that people lose welfare from using Facebook. Even after experiencing a happier month without Facebook, howeve...

  Creating more equitable digital environments will require regulating platforms, as well as strengthening the social resources that help adolescents navigate a highly digitalised and unequal world. Key Insights  For adolescents , Problematic Social Media Use (PSMU) is associated with more psychological complaints and lower life evaluation in all 43 countries we examined. These associations are most pronounced in Anglo-Celtic countries and least problematic in the Caucasus-Black Sea region. Globally, the relationship between PSMU and lower wellbeing is stronger among adolescents from lower socioeconomic backgrounds than among their higher-status peers. Socioeconomic differences in the relationship between PSMU and adolescent wellbeing are stronger for life evaluation than for psychological complaints. Socioeconomic gradients for life evaluation are consistent across Anglo-Celtic, Caucasus-Black Sea, Central-Eastern, Nordic, and Western European countries, but are weak in...

 Specifically, we ask: do internet and social media use affect subjective wellbeing not only directly, but also indirectly by altering levels of societal trust and social connection? Key Insights  Previous studies from the World Happiness Report highlight the importance of trust and social connections for wellbeing. This chapter explores how the rise of internet and social media use has affected wellbeing directly , and also indirectly by altering trust, social connections, and emotional bonds. We use four rounds of the European Social Survey (ESS), covering 30 countries over the years 2016 to 2024, to investigate the impact of internet use upon wellbeing. In order to measure the total impact of internet use, we instrument it by M-Lab data on local internet speed. The instrumental variable results reveal a significant negative coefficient on internet use that is not visible in standard OLS estimations. The estimated relationship between internet use and wellbeing varies sharp...