from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
The debate over whether social media is good or bad has not ended, but a University of California San Diego study may offer comfort to Facebook users. UC researchers, with colleagues at Yale and at Facebook, confirm in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the long-held belief that people who have stronger social networks live longer, and document what happens online may matter also. First author William Hobbs says online interactions seem to be healthy when moderate and combined with offline interactions. It was only at the extreme—spending a lot of time online with little evidence of connecting to people otherwise that researchers saw a negative association. One more thing: the number of “likes” we get on Facebook does not seem to correlate with longevity.