An incredible new study has come to an astonishing conclusion about what your Facebook usage is doing to you.
A new study is claiming something that is truly remarkable about the uber-popular social media platform Facebook: namely, that people who accept more Facebook friend requests are expected to live longer lives. Yes, really. That’s from a real study published in the National Academy of Science by scientists out of Northeastern University and the University of California.
The scientists studied Facebook activity over the course of a decade and found that people with stronger social media networks who get lots of friend requests are less likely to pass away. It’s a demonstration that there is a stronger link between a person’s health and their social media accounts than we realize, and social media isn’t always a negative.
While mortality risk was associated with those who had high levels of offline social interaction, it also correlates with moderate levels of online social interaction through platforms like Facebook. Scientists think that this is because people who interact over Facebook are more likely to remain friends with them in person.
“Interacting online seems to be healthy when the online activity is moderate and complements interactions offline,” said first author William Hobbs, who worked on the study as a UC San Diego doctoral student in political science and is now a postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern University. “It is only on the extreme end, spending a lot of time online with little evidence of being connected to people otherwise, that we see a negative association.”
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