Does Using Social Media Increase or Decrease Happiness? An Empirical Study of Facebook Users in Taiwan

In 2022, around 90% of the entire population in Taiwan are active social media users. Although several studies have examined the emotion changes among social media users in Taiwan, the problem of endogeneity stemming from reverse causality was not recognized and properly addressed. Therefore, this study examines the effect of social media usage on negative emotions using “the frequency of using mobile phones as opposed to landline phones” and “the frequency of using the Internet to run errands” as instrument variables for social media usage. Using the data drawn from the 2017 “Taiwan Social Change Survey”, our estimation results showed that Facebook usage significantly increased the frequency of users experiencing negative emotions, including envy, feeling having inferior lives, and depression. The findings suggested that the negative emotions brought by social comparison upon using social media likely outweighed the happiness brought by social media, resulting in Facebook users experiencing more negative emotions. One important implication of our study is that reducing social media usage could alleviate mood swings