TWISS #2: Online News, Social Media, and Happiness
Well-being in the internet age
Welcome to This Week in Social Science. This edition explores recent research about how our consumption of online news and social media impact our happiness and well-being.
If it bleeds, it leads: People are drawn to negative news online
Most of us have heard that if it bleeds it leads, but is that true? Much of the evidence for that claim comes from correlational studies, which makes casual interpretation difficult. To address this, a team of researchers analyzed data from the media company Upworthy, which had conducted internal randomized trials of different story headlines to better drive engagement with their articles. To test whether negative news headlines better drive engagement, the researchers accessed more than 105,000 variations of news stories that had driven more than 5.7 million engagements. They found that although positive words were more prevalent than negative words overall, negative words in a headline increased engagement by 2.3% per word and positive words decreased engagement by 1% per word. This research is a sobering reminder of how we are drawn to negativity, which may have dangerous implications for our perceptions of the world around us.1
Figure: Each additional positive word (left) reduces engagement as measured by click-through rate (CTR), while each additional negative word (right) increases engagement (Robertson et al. 2023).
Do social media detoxes make you feel better?
From unrealistic expectations driven by Instagram influencers to fear-mongering by clickbait muckrakers, social media seems to have the ability to make people lose focus on the good things in life, causing a general malaise. One recommendation you might encounter is to detox from social media, taking a break to improve your mental and physical health. But does that work? Researchers conducted a meta-analysis of ten studies involving 4,674 people that tested the effectiveness of social media detoxes on life satisfaction and on positive and negative emotions. Disappointingly, the evidence suggests that social media detoxes have no effect on life satisfaction or emotional states, positive or negative. However, the researchers note that these experiments mostly focused on short-term detoxes averaging about a week in length, not long-term detoxes. Perhaps just as important as detoxing from social media is how we replace that time in our lives. Do we fill that time with friends, family, and community? It may be the combination of a detox and a healthy social diet that leads to better well-being overall.2
Robertson, C. E., Pröllochs, N., Schwarzenegger, K., Pärnamets, P., Van Bavel, J. J., & Feuerriegel, S. (2023). Negativity drives online news consumption. Nature human behaviour, 7(5), 812-822.
Lemahieu, L., Vander Zwalmen, Y., Mennes, M., Koster, E. H., Vanden Abeele, M. M., & Poels, K. (2025). The effects of social media abstinence on affective well-being and life satisfaction: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Scientific Reports, 15(1), 7581.
Absolutely agree that one week of detoxing from social media isn't nearly enough to explore improving the quality of one's life. Social media “recovery” will take a while. It's recovery from isolation and loneliness. It's seeking out ways to handle not just THAT you feel angry or frustrated about, but WHY you are angry and frustrated and what to do with those feelings besides screaming into the void.
Maybe you've heard of Mallory McMorrow who is a state senator in Michigan but now running for Gary Peters’s seat in the United States Senate. She says to put down your phones, stop filling out petitions, and pick one cause that you want to get involved with and do it. Perhaps this is the antidote to social media overuse (addiction?), and maybe it's not completely giving it up but learning how to limit it and to relearn how to have a face-to-face conversation with another human being.
May I make one more observation regarding a potential idea of why people are drawn to negativity? Being negative is easy, perhaps it’s part of our evolution, to always be on the lookout, to expect danger, be suspicious, to fight or flight (the limbic system). It takes a more developed brain (pre frontal cortex) to develop empathy. It takes even more training to develop it as a daily practice.