Running Header: SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS 1

Social Media Analytics:

Negative Implications

Of Facebook Use

Among Young Adults

Crystal Stephenson

University of South Florida

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Social Media Analytics: Negative Implications of Facebook Use Among Young Adults

The field of social media analytics has emerged from the rapid growth in use of popular

social media platforms today, particularly among young adults. “The prevalence of online social

networks” (Yesha & Gangopadhyay, 2015, p. 616) has presented “an unprecedented opportunity

to extract the patterns that are hidden in the increasingly voluminous amounts of text” within the

platform, including trends and shifts in user behavior. With a comparatively larger user base,

Facebook is “a contemporary phenomenon” (Frost & Rickwood, 2017, p. 577), which “justifies

investigation into the psychological characteristics of” its user base. Big data analytics has been

useful to researchers in examining the behavior of users and the impact their use has on their

mental health. Although there is some evidence to show that the use of Facebook lends itself to

positive reinforcement, there is much research to the contrary. Evidence has shown a potentially

negative influence among young adults, but women of college age in particular, predominantly

due to social comparison orientation and envy. It is the purpose of this paper to identify the

effects Facebook use has on user moods and mental health by reviewing the findings published

by researchers in this expanding field. In an effort to narrow the scope of social media analysis

on mental health, the goal is to examine Facebook use among the demographic of young adults,

ages 18-29, with special reference to young women in particular. We will begin by reviewing the

informational science and technology behind social media analytics, followed by an examination

of the effects Facebook use has shown to be evident in young adults, and conclude with ethical

implications and caveats of these studies.

Social media analytics is defined as “an emerging interdisciplinary research field that

aims on combining, extending, and adapting methods for analysis of social media data” (Stieglitz

et al., 2018, p. 157). The process of social media analytics encompasses four distinct steps of
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data discovery, collection, preparation, and analysis. The evolution of social media has “become

an important driver for acquiring and spreading information in different domains,” from business

to entertainment, social sciences to politics, and has therefore “led to an increasing accumulation

of data” (Stieglitz et al., 2018, p. 156), otherwise termed “Social Media Big Data,” for which to

glean insights from a variety of groups and demographics. The different data formats include

textual data, pictures, videos, sounds, and geo-locations, all of which can be divided into

unstructured and structured categories.

“The massive amount of data in user updates” (Yesha & Gangopadhyay, 2015, p. 616) on

Facebook has been prime for analysis through means of forum data and short message clustering,

including “document clustering, topic modeling sentiment analysis, and text mining.” (Yesha &

Gangopadhyay, 2015, p. 616) “Topic modeling algorithms are statistical methods that analyze the

words of the original documents and discover themes that occur.” (Yesha & Gangopadhyay,

2015, p. 616) A great deal of social media contains sentiment-based sentences as well. In this

context, sentiment “is defined as a personal belief or judgment that is not founded on proof or

certainty” (Yesha & Gangopadhyay, 2015, p. 616), and involves “the use of Natural Language

Processing (NLP), statistics, or machine learning methods to extract, identify, or characterize the

sentiment content or a text source.” Text mining is another method of information discovery by

way of automatic extraction “from a large amount of various unstructured textual resources”

(Yesha & Gangopadhyay, 2015, p. 616), breeding “valuable insights from text-based content

such as word documents, email, and postings” on social media sites. Text analytics software can

assist in “transposing words and phrases in unstructured data into numerical values which can

then be linked with structured data in a database and analyzed with traditional data mining
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techniques” (Yesha & Gangopadhyay, 2015, p. 616), including “methods of corpus handling,

data import, metadata management, preprocessing, and the creation of term-document matrices.”

“Online text sources form evolving large scale data repositories out of which valuable

knowledge about human emotions can be derived.” (Chatzakou et al., 2017, p. 318) New

technologies have come to dominate our lives with “constant and evolving digital social

interactions” on “mega” social media platforms, like Facebook, in which daily activity has

overcome one billion users. As Facebook users increasingly choose “to share their thoughts and

emotions that encompass their daily lives” (Yesha & Gangopadhyay, 2015, p. 617-618), patterns

in the big data analytics “can be useful to users, clinicians, and researchers alike” in determining

“the underlying factors that affect individuals, identifying the proper forum and searching for

specific discussion threads.” The detection of “primary emotions, social ones, and those that

characterize general affective states from online text sources” (Chatzakou et al., 2017, p. 318) is

performed through both data collection in social media analytics, with an emphasis on data

preparation, in addition to other existing methodologies of machine learning and lexicon-based

approaches.

We choose to focus on the social media conglomerate, Facebook, due to the prevalence of

use, the vast informational data available by which to extract, and the abundance of established

research already published in this growing field. To put it numerically, the statistics in 2016,

released by the Pew Research Center, reported 1.65 billion monthly active Facebook users and

an average of 1.09 million daily active users. “Every minute, 684,478 pieces of content –

including photos, status updates, and comments – are shared on Facebook” (Cramer et al., 2016,

p. 739), among which 82% are young adults, ages 18-29. It is thereby relevant to examine this

abundance of “social media ‘big data’ in conjunction with associated technologies like natural
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language processing and machine learning to address pressing problems in population-level

mental health surveillance and research” (Conway & O’Connor, 2016, p. 1).

While social media “is well established as a data source in” other domains, the analysis

has been “increasingly used in population health monitoring and is beginning to be used for

mental health applications” (Conway & O’Connor, 2016, p. 1). An “important feature of research

in this domain is that it is inherently interdisciplinary and dispersed across health journals (e.g.

PubMed), psychology journals (e.g. PsycINFO), and computer science conference and workshop

proceedings” (Conway & O’Connor, 2016, p. 2). For instance, one study “used Facebook status

updates, in combination with the results of a personality survey of 28,749 Facebook users to

predict – using a regression model – degree of depression for a given user, finding that user

mood worsens in the transition from summer to winter.” (Conway & O’Connor, 2016, p. 4)

“The application of meta-analytic techniques is required to quantify the nature and

direction of the relationships between Facebook use and mental health outcomes” (Frost &

Rickwood, 2017, p. 595). Six key mental health domains that have been associated with

Facebook use include “Facebook addiction, anxiety, depression, body image and disordered

eating, drinking cognitions and alcohol use, and other mental health problems, albeit the strength

and validity of these relationships varied.” (Frost & Rickwood, 2017, p. 595) Body image,

disordered eating, and depression, have been linked to comparison studies. As one researcher

contends, “social media offers a novel medium in which social comparison can take place”

(Vogel et al., 2015, p. 249), suggesting that people high in social comparison orientation “might

be more drawn to social media and more affected by the comparisons made therein.” The

abundance of information available through these forums includes “accomplishments, attitudes,

activities, personalities, relationship status, daily habits, routines” and photo sharing, which is an
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“ideal platform for social comparison to take place.” (Vogel et al., 2015, p. 249) The results

“have practical implications” for Facebook use, concluding that individuals more susceptible to

social comparison orientation “use Facebook more heavily than people low” in orientation.

These individuals are therefore “more vulnerable to the potentially detrimental consequences of

social media use due to their sensitivity to social comparison information.” (Vogel et al., 2015, p.

255) While social media “can have many positive effects, such as promoting feelings of

belongingness, maintaining relationships, and providing social support” (Vogel et al., 2015, p.

255), it is important to recognize and understand “the different social and personality factors that

determine when and for whom the detrimental effects” of these platforms can manifest.

The use of Facebook has become “ubiquitous among young adults” (Kim & Park, 2016,

p. 427), defined here as ages 18-29 years old. Young adults of college age are disproportionately

obtained for these studies, because “Facebook use among college students is pervasive and

conspicuous” (Lee, 2014, p. 254), making it easier to examine their behavior on this format.

Students also “tend to more frequently engage in social comparison behavior than adults,” while

still developing their sense of self and identity, and far more “susceptible to peer influence” (Lee,

2014, p. 254). More specifically, however, when compared among genders, “young women

prefer and more frequently use” Facebook, which has been linked to body image concerns in

recent years. “In particular, Facebook photograph usage (e.g. posting or viewing photographs) is

significantly associated with young women’s body image disturbances such as weight

dissatisfaction.” (Kim & Park, 2016, p. 427) It should be noted that, the research suggests female

college students with already existing “high levels of appearance comparison orientation and

appearance schemas, and low levels of self-esteem, are more vulnerable to the negative effects of

Facebook News Feed photographs.” (Kim & Park, 2016, p. 427)

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The personal comparisons “with idealized images from traditional media have been

known” for years “to lead to body image concerns among young women” (Kim & Park, 2016, p.

427), so it’s natural to see a shift in how Facebook usage may thus influence “young women’s

body image concerns by providing evidence of negative effects of full-bodied pictures of

attractive others on Facebook News Feeds.” (Kim & Park, 2016, p. 433) A Swedish study found

that while “women (77%) tend to use Facebook more than men (66%)” (Cramer et al., 2016, p.

745) in the United States, accordingly, women also experienced “a relationship between time

spent on Facebook and feelings of reduced happiness and contentment” (Cramer et al., 2016, p.

745), not found to be evident in men. Moreover, among “adolescents in Australia, Facebook use

leads to a greater sense of self-concept for males, while females using Facebook reported more

depression and lower self-esteem” (Cramer et al., 2016, p. 745).

While “seeking attention and acknowledgement from others are reported as primary

drivers of Facebook use” (Burrow & Rainone, 2016, p. 232), “relying on affirmation from others

in order to feel good about oneself may signal contingent self-worth, which can undermine well-

being over time.” Sociometer theory “holds that self-esteem is calibrated to cues of inclusion or

rejection within the social environment” (Burrow & Rainone, 2016, p. 232), in which case,

“having Facebook friends who are more responsive can satisfy psychological needs above and

beyond the number of Facebook friends one has.” Facebook “allows users to ‘like’ the content

they view with the click of a button.” Innocent and simplistic on its face, evidence suggests that,

relying on virtual affirmation may lead to negative feelings of inferiority, dissatisfaction, and

envy. Indeed, the science has shown “that adolescents who viewed photographs posted to social

media that had received more likes demonstrated greater activation of neural regions involved in

reward processing.” (Burrow & Rainone, 2016, p. 235) While “the benefits associated with
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receiving positive feedback on social media may be uniquely contextualized,” we must consider

the “evidence that spending greater amounts of time on Facebook has been linked to decreased

subjective wellbeing and life satisfaction.” (Burrow & Rainone, 2016, p. 236)

Feelings of envy are a natural extension of discussions about comparison. Unfortunately,

numerous studies have shown a correlation between Facebook use and envy as a catalyst for

depression. One such study “found that Facebook use resulted in envy and that this envy lead to

negative life satisfaction among college students” (Tandoc Jr. et al., 2015, p. 141), and when

students “experience envy from Facebook over a long period of time, it might lead to

depression.” Another study “concluded that ‘efforts to cope [with envy] may also lead to a

chronic focus on their inferiority, which might exacerbate shame and ultimately lead to

depression” (Tandoc Jr. et al., 2015, p. 141) as well. A method by which to capture these feelings

is an application of data analytics that collects language and specific words describing emotion

shared in posts, which “may include feelings of worthlessness, helplessness, guilt, and self-

hatred, which are all characteristic of depression.” (Yesha & Gangopadhyay, 2015, p. 617)

Studies have also shown that exposure to social media platforms during early adulthood

can “influence attitudes towards alcohol use, and that individuals with larger online networks are

more likely to exhibit problematic alcohol-related behaviors.” (Frost & Rickwood, 2017, p. 594)

“Accordingly, it has been proposed that Facebook use can impinge on an individual’s wellbeing

and mental health” with unfortunate results. The diverse effects include feelings of isolation, an

increase in psychological distress, misperceptions about the happiness of fellow Facebook users,

“dissatisfaction with intimate partner relationships” (Frost & Rickwood, 2017, p. 594), negative

mood, lower self-esteem, “body dissatisfaction” and a drive to be thinner, depressive symptoms,

and anxiety. “These adverse outcomes are augmented for users exhibiting addictive use of
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Facebook” (Frost & Rickwood, 2017, p. 577), among which “users experience many negative

consequences in addition to cognitive and behavioral symptoms of addiction, which include

salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict, and relapse components related to

their personal Facebook use.”

No analysis would be complete without considering the ethical implications of examining

social media data, specifically in the domain of mental health research. Since “anything and

everything an individual posts to a social media site may be used for research purposes”

(Conway & O’Connor, 2016, p. 5), the primary implication of privacy has naturally “been

identified as a key ethical concern for population-level social media research” (Conway &

O’Connor, 2016, p. 5), particularly in consideration of stigmatization. However, it should be

noted that, “the large-scale nature of the data sets in use mean that it is unlikely that individual

users will be specifically identified.” (Conway & O’Connor, 2016, p. 5) It is also “proposed that

the field should move away from investigating the dichotomous research question of whether

Facebook use is good or bad” (Frost & Rickwood, 2017, p. 596), as it is very likely “that some

users experience positive outcomes while others (and possibly the same users at different points

in time) experience deleterious outcomes.” Therefore, some researchers would redirect the focus

of study on individual “factors and mechanisms that comprise risk and protective factors for the

effects of Facebook use.” (Frost & Rickwood, 2017, p. 596)

“A popular outlet for communication and connection, Facebook is a valuable site for

research into social behavior, particularly social comparison and psychological factors associated

with interacting with others in a world of optimized selves.” (Cramer et al., 2016, p. 745) While

the research on mental health implications of Facebook use is still in its infancy, much has been

published, revealing a correlation between use of these platforms and negative factors of
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comparison orientation, personal dissatisfaction, envy, and possibly depression. Although studies

have focused disproportionately on young adults and women thus far, it would be prudent for

analysts to both expand their sample base and continue to research correlations between social

media platforms and mental health across a diverse set of demographics. The work of scientists,

practitioners, and clinicians has no doubt been augmented by the introduction of social media

analytics in recent years, and thus determined beneficial to all domains of study going forward.

References

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