Top Research Papers on Social Media

The results indicated that psychological well-being influences CSMU, which in concurrence with sleep habits, influences the association between FoMO and problematic sleep, and FoMO is more strongly associated with CSMU among working professionals.

This paper begins by distinguishing the roles of primary and secondary cues in evoking medium-as-social-actor presence and social responses and identifies mindless and mindful anthropomorphism as two major complementary mechanisms for understanding MASA phenomena.

Over the last five years, widespread concern about the effects of social media on democracy has led to an explosion in research from different disciplines and corners of academia. This book is the first of its kind to take stock of this emerging multi-disciplinary field by synthesizing what we know, identifying what we do not know and obstacles to future research, and charting a course for the future inquiry. Chapters by leading scholars cover major topics – from disinformation to hate speech to political advertising – and situate recent developments in the context of key policy questions. In ...

We study the effect on stock volatility and turnover of coverage by traditional news media and social media. We find that coverage by traditional news media predicts decreases in subsequent volatility and turnover, but coverage by social media predicts increases in volatility and turnover. We show that these patters are consistent with a model of "echo chambers", where social networks repeat news, but some investors interpret repeated signals as genuinely new information. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This theoretical article reviews how the term control is part of theorizing on privacy, and develops an understanding of online privacy with communication as the core mechanism by which privacy is regulated.

What are the effects of a brand's owned social media? This meta-analysis examines the impact of owned social media on social media engagement and sales. Whereas the findings support some current beliefs (e.g., owned social media are more effective to boost sales for new [vs. mature] products), it highlights several novel insights. Contrary to popular beliefs that owned social media mainly drive engagement and hardly affect sales, the results show the opposite, with an average elasticity of .137 for social media engagement and .353 for sales. In addition, the results suggest ways to better adap...

Abstract A recurring hypothesis in the literature is that “passive” social media use (browsing) leads to negative effects on well-being. This preregistered study investigated a rival hypothesis, which states that the effects of browsing on well-being depend on person-specific susceptibilities to envy, inspiration, and enjoyment. We conducted a three-week experience sampling study among 353 adolescents (13–15 years, 126 assessments per adolescent). Using an advanced N = 1 method of analysis, we found sizeable heterogeneity in the associations of browsing with envy, inspiration, and enjoyment (e...

It is demonstrated that brand–consumer interactions, both content-consumption and content-contribution intentions, can be fostered by certain motives of using social media: information-seeking and self-identity.

The role of social media in promoting sustainable attitudes is currently understudied. Underpinned by social learning theory, this study unveils the effect of social media usage and browsing on sustainable purchasing attitude, the underlying mechanism, and the boundary condition. Drawing on a sample of 693 experienced respondents analyzed using structural equation modeling, this study reveals that social media usage and browsing have a significant positive association. Both constructs significantly impact sustainable purchasing attitudes with complementary partial mediation of the drive for en...

Despite their increasing ubiquity in people's lives and incredible advantages in instantly interacting with others, social media's impact on subjective well-being is a source of concern worldwide and calls for up-to-date investigations of the role social media plays in mental health. Much research has discovered how habitual social media use may lead to addiction and negatively affect adolescents' school performance, social behavior, and interpersonal relationships. The present study was conducted to review the extant literature in the domain of social media and analyze global research product...

sponsorship: This work was supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen) under Grant 11D3119N. (Research Foundation Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen)|11D3119N)

Findings show that market mavens (when compared to non-mavens) have more followers, post more often, have less readable posts, use more uppercase letters, use less distinct words, and use hashtags more often.

The relationship between social media and self-esteem is complex, as studies tend to find a mixed pattern of relationships and meta-analyses tend to find small, albeit significant, magnitudes of statistical effects. One explanation is that social media use does not affect self-esteem for the majority of users, while small minorities experience either positive or negative effects, as evidenced by recent research calculating person-specific within-person effects. This suggests that the true relationship between social media use and self-esteem is person-specific and based on individual susceptib...

We provide quasi-experimental estimates of the impact of social media on mental health by leveraging a unique natural experiment: the staggered introduction of Facebook across US colleges. Our analysis couples data on student mental health around the years of Facebook’s expansion with a generalized difference-in-differences empirical strategy. We find that the rollout of Facebook at a college had a negative impact on student mental health. It also increased the likelihood with which students reported experiencing impairments to academic performance due to poor mental health. Additional evidenc...

The use of social media to organise offline action to be highly predictive of the belief that vaccinations are unsafe, with such beliefs mounting as more organisation occurs on social media.

The rise of social media has provoked both optimism about potential societal benefits and concern about harms such as addiction, depression, and political polarization. In a randomized experiment, we find that deactivating Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 US midterm election (i) reduced online activity, 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 post-experiment Facebook use. Deactivation reduced post-experiment va...

The findings reveal the value of real-life social support when considering the relationship between problematic social media use and mental health and reveal that real- life social support was associated with reduced depression, anxiety, and social isolation while social support on social media was not associated with these mental health measures.

Social media sites offer critical opportunities for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and other sexual and/or gender minority (LGBTQ+) youth to enhance well-being through exploring their identities, accessing resources, and connecting with peers. Yet extant measures of youth social media use disproportionately focus on the detrimental impacts of online participation, such as overuse and cyberbullying. This study developed a Social Media Benefits Scale (SMBS) through an online survey with a diverse sample ( n = 6,178) of LGBTQ+ youth aged 14–29. Over three-quarters of the sample endorsed no...

There is both public and scholarly concern that (passive) social media use decreases well-being by providing a fertile ground for harmful (upward) social comparison and envy. The present review critically summarizes evidence on this assumption. We first comprehensively synthesize existing evidence, including both prior reviews and the most recent publications (2019-2021). Results show that earlier research finds social comparison and envy to be common on social media and linked to lower well-being. Yet, increasingly, newer studies contradict this conclusion, finding positive links to well-bein...

The relationship between social media use and life satisfaction changes across adolescent development. Our analyses of two UK datasets comprising 84,011 participants (10-80 years old) find that the cross-sectional relationship between self-reported estimates of social media use and life satisfaction ratings is most negative in younger adolescents. Furthermore, sex differences in this relationship are only present during this time. Longitudinal analyses of 17,409 participants (10-21 years old) suggest distinct developmental windows of sensitivity to social media in adolescence, when higher esti...