Social Media Usage and the Level of Depressive Symptoms in the United States

• DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3672093
• Publication Date: 2020-09-02T11:31:47Z
• Authors: Qin Jiang

The use of social media can either decrease the level depressive symptoms by providing support or increase putting pressure on users. This paper leverages fixed effects and instrumental variable models to find that using (Twitter Facebook) decreases average. result explains why usage in US grows steadily even though most studies more correlates with higher levels symptoms. Three explanations reconcile negative causal effect positive correlation: confounder, improvement, heterogeneity.