The Welfare Effects of Social Media

Trouxe do Twitter do Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald): “Novo estudo avalia os efeitos de desativação do Facebook por apenas 4 semanas e descobre que enquanto as pessoas ficam levemente menos informadas sobre as notícias, sua saúde mental e seu senso de bem-estar aumentam palpavelmente.”

Leia a integra do estudo aqui (em inglês): https://t.co/QZx9jtjiki

Esta postagem dialoga com outra mais antiga – Dez argumentos para você deletar agora as suas redes sociais, de Jason Lanier – que você pode acessar aqui.

E agora deixo vocês com os autores, abstract e keywords do estudo referido pelo Glenn Greenwald:

The Welfare Effects of Social Media
Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, and Matthew Gentzkow
January 27, 2019
Abstract
The rise of social media has provoked both optimism about potential societal benefits and
concern about harms such as addiction, depression, and political polarization. We present a randomized evaluation of the welfare effects of Facebook, focusing on US users in the run-
up to the 2018 midterm election. We measured the willingness-to-accept of 2,844 Facebook users to deactivate their Facebook accounts for four weeks, then randomly assigned a subset to actually do so in a way that we verified. Using a suite of outcomes from both surveys and
direct measurement, we show that Facebook deactivation (i) reduced online activity, including
other social media, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (iii) increased subjective well-being; and (iv) caused a large persistent reduction in Facebook use after the experiment. We use participants’ pre-experiment and post-experiment Facebook
valuations to quantify the extent to which factors such as projection bias might cause people to overvalue Facebook, finding that the magnitude of any such biases is likely minor relative to the large consumer surplus that Facebook generates.

Keywords: Social media, political polarization, subjective well-being, consumer surplus,
projection bias.