Frequent Facebook Users More Likely To Live Longer

As our social lives have moved onto social media sites like Facebook over the past decade, there’s been a lot of hand wringing over what all that screen time might be doing to our health. But according to a new paper; time spent on social media could be associated with a longer life. The paper, published in the journal PNAS on 31 October asserts that the health effects of active online social lives largely mirrors the benefits of busy offline social lives. Researchers find that people with more friends online are less likely to die than their disconnected counterparts. This evidence contradicts assertions that social media have had a net-negative impact on health. The study’s methods were approved by three university and state review boards, but skeptics will more that Facebook itself was closely involved with it. Researchers have something’s in writing that they couldn’t interfere with the publication of the research no matter what the result was. They noted, though, that some at the company had been “pretty confident that they were going to find this result. The research confirms what scientists have known for a long time about the offline world: People who have stronger social networks live longer. The study was based on 12 million social media profiles made available to the researchers by Facebook, as well as records from the California department of health. It found that “moderate use” of Facebook was associated with the lowest mortality rate, and that receiving friend requests correlated with reduced mortality, but that sending friend requests did not. The paper fond that people with large or even average social networks lived longer than people who had very small social networks. The paper itself acknowledges the study’s “many limitations,” saying that Facebook is unique among social media websites and that its data might not be more broadly applicable. It also points out that its findings represent a correlative relationship as opposed to a causal one: There is no evidence in the paper that using Facebook has any direct effect on a person’s health.