Social Media and Life Satisfaction: Evidence from Chinese Time-Use Survey

Abstract

Social media has profoundly reshaped the way people obtain and exchange information. Recently, concerns have been raised on its adverse impacts on people’s subjective well-being. Using a large and representative sample of Chinese individuals, we explore the effects of social media browsing and social media communication on users life satisfaction. The results show that while social media browsing has a strong negative impact on users’ subjective well-being, there is no significant impact generated by social media communication. The relative income and social comparison mainly drive the result. The negative impact of social media browsing is more pronounced for low-income people than for high-income people. The latter is influenced more by updates shared by their friends, while the former is influenced more by news from public sources. Our results do not support other possible mechanisms like information cocoons or information fragmentation.