Facebook addiction increases depression severity among already depressed people

Social media is just pure individualistic ego-stroking by comparison. The message is “my life is better than yours”.

Having spent a lot of time in addiction recovery spaces, addiction and depression have astoundingly high comorbidity, to the point where much of the time it's hard to tell where one begins and the other ends, which came first in a given person.

There probably are specifics of a social media addiction that are relevant to how it affects users in depression. But that's true of all addiction as well, they all have relevant specifics.

Facebook is the longest-running of our major social networks and the first one where most people really understood that something had fundamentally changed about the world because of it, so it is the most studied. And studies take time, so we have a larger body of research on it specifically. I can almost guarantee that similar findings will obtain about other social media platforms, regardless of their individual dynamics or character.

But years ago she quit.

I hear about Meta and that they own WhatsApp and I see people using WhatsApp.

But FaceBook: among my friends and family who used to post there, nobody ever posts anything. I don't doubt many are still logged in by default because they haven't updated their computer in years but they simply do not posts anything anymore, don't use if to message people (they use WhatsApp or Telegram instead) and don't check their feed.

And most of all: people don't ever talk about FaceBook at parties anymore. Since a long time. It used be a thing: people would ask if you were on FB or tell you about this or that person that posted this or that thing on FB. People don't do that anymore.

I don't understand where FB's MAU numbers do come from: in my (non tech) circle FB is simply already dead.