Advancing our understanding of the associations between social media use and well-being

Abstract

The effect of social media use on well-being is among the hottest debates in academia and society at large. Adults and adolescents alike spend around 2-3 h per day on social media [1], and they typically use five to seven different platforms in a complementary way, to chat with their friends, to browse others??? posts, and present themselves to their friends and followers [2,3]. In parallel with this surging social media use, research into its impact on well-being has accumulated rapidly. In the past three years, at least 50 meta-analyses and reviews on social media have appeared, which together cover hundreds of empirical studies [4,5]. Moreover, in the same period, several umbrella reviews (i.e., reviews of reviews and metaanalyses) have been published [4,6,7], of which one is included in this special issue [5]. These umbrella reviews reveal that the reported associations of social media use with well-being are inconclusive [4-7], which begets the question how research should advance to bring greater agreement and nuance to this field of research.