Lately, Facebook hasn’t exactly had the best reputation, but it turns out the social media site is educating people to some extent.
Researchers from New York University and Stanford University invited nearly 3,000 Facebook users to fill out questionnaires about their daily habits, politics, and general mood.
They then randomly chose half of these participants to deactivate their accounts for a payment of $102. After four weeks, surveys were provided again to measure the emotional and intellectual changes among all participants.
Those who managed to stay off Facebook had at least one hour more of extra free time and reported marginally better moods. They were also five to ten percent less polarized on political issues compared to the control group that remained on Facebook throughout the study.
However, those who stayed off Facebook had less factual knowledge when it came to current events compared to before they came off of the platform.
It’s not clear what this means, though. Study co-author Matthew Gentzkow told the New York Times, “It’s hard to know what to make of this. It may be that seeing a lot of news and politics on Facebook tends to polarize people. But once they’re off Facebook, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re using the extra time to read [the newspaper].”
