And the thing we’ve found is that you can break Facebook and social media use into two categories. One is where people are connecting and building relationships, even if it’s subtle, even if it’s just I post a photo and someone I haven’t talked to in a while comments. That person is reminding me that they care about me.
The other part of the use is basically content consumption. So that’s watching videos, reading news, passively consuming content in a way where you’re not actually interacting with anyone or building a relationship. And what we find is that the things that are about interacting with people and building relationships end up being correlated with all of the measures of long-term well-being that you’d expect, whereas the things that are primarily just about content consumption, even if they’re informative or entertaining and people say they like them, are not as correlated with long-term measures of well-being.
Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s Future
