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 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...

 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...