No, that viral study doesn’t show you can improve your mental health by deactivating Instagram

Social Media While a viral post called the results “shocking,” the study itself found little evidence that social media use harms mental health. Jack Nicastro | 6.30.2025 4:18 PM (Illustration: Eddie Marshall | Yasser Mutwakil | Midjourney) A study by Stanford’s Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) on the effects of social media went viral on X over the weekend. While the post represents the results as “shocking,” the study itself found little evidence that social media use hurts its users. The SIEPR study was published as a working paper in April with the National Bureau of Economic Research. Of the 27 co-authors, most of whom are associated with American universities, eight are researchers from Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook. The researchers recruited 19,857 Facebook users and 15,585 Instagram users to carry out “the largest-ever experimental study on the effect of social media deactivation on users’ emotional state.” More than a quarter of the Facebook and Instagram users were assigned to treatment groups and were paid to deactivate their respective accounts for six weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election. (All other users were part of the control group, which required users to deactivate their accounts
Read More