Logo
ScienceStack
Table of Contents
Fetching ...
Sign In

The Hidden Toll of Social Media News: Causal Effects on Psychosocial Wellbeing

Olivia Pal, Agam Goyal, Eshwar Chandrasekharan, Koustuv Saha

TL;DR

The paper tackles how everyday news engagement on social media shapes psychosocial wellbeing, disentangling effects by engagement modality. Using a large-scale Bluesky dataset and a quasi-experimental design with stratified propensity-score matching, the authors estimate how exposure to a News feed influences affective, behavioral, and cognitive outcomes over two months. They find a nuanced pattern: routine news engagement increases depression, anxiety, and stress but reduces loneliness and boosts social interaction, with bookmarking driving the largest costs and active engagement driving stronger behavioral and linguistic changes. These modality-specific causal insights have important implications for platform design and user tools, suggesting ways to preserve social benefits of news while mitigating emotional costs, and highlighting methodological benefits of quasi-experimental approaches on large-scale social data.

Abstract

News consumption on social media has become ubiquitous, yet how different forms of engagement shape psychosocial outcomes remains unclear. To address this gap, we leveraged a large-scale dataset of ~26M posts and ~45M comments on the BlueSky platform, and conducted a quasi-experimental study, matching 81,345 Treated users exposed to News feeds with 83,711 Control users using stratified propensity score analysis. We examined psychosocial wellbeing, in terms of affective, behavioral, and cognitive outcomes. Our findings reveal that news engagement produces systematic trade-offs: increased depression, stress, and anxiety, yet decreased loneliness and increased social interaction on the platform. Regression models reveal that News feed bookmarking is associated with greater psychosocial deterioration compared to commenting or quoting, with magnitude differences exceeding tenfold. These per-engagement effects accumulate with repeated exposure, showing significant psychosocial impacts. Our work extends theories of news effects beyond crisis-centric frameworks by demonstrating that routine consumption creates distinct psychological dynamics depending on engagement type, and bears implications for tools and interventions for mitigating the psychosocial costs of news consumption on social media.

The Hidden Toll of Social Media News: Causal Effects on Psychosocial Wellbeing

TL;DR

The paper tackles how everyday news engagement on social media shapes psychosocial wellbeing, disentangling effects by engagement modality. Using a large-scale Bluesky dataset and a quasi-experimental design with stratified propensity-score matching, the authors estimate how exposure to a News feed influences affective, behavioral, and cognitive outcomes over two months. They find a nuanced pattern: routine news engagement increases depression, anxiety, and stress but reduces loneliness and boosts social interaction, with bookmarking driving the largest costs and active engagement driving stronger behavioral and linguistic changes. These modality-specific causal insights have important implications for platform design and user tools, suggesting ways to preserve social benefits of news while mitigating emotional costs, and highlighting methodological benefits of quasi-experimental approaches on large-scale social data.

Abstract

News consumption on social media has become ubiquitous, yet how different forms of engagement shape psychosocial outcomes remains unclear. To address this gap, we leveraged a large-scale dataset of ~26M posts and ~45M comments on the BlueSky platform, and conducted a quasi-experimental study, matching 81,345 Treated users exposed to News feeds with 83,711 Control users using stratified propensity score analysis. We examined psychosocial wellbeing, in terms of affective, behavioral, and cognitive outcomes. Our findings reveal that news engagement produces systematic trade-offs: increased depression, stress, and anxiety, yet decreased loneliness and increased social interaction on the platform. Regression models reveal that News feed bookmarking is associated with greater psychosocial deterioration compared to commenting or quoting, with magnitude differences exceeding tenfold. These per-engagement effects accumulate with repeated exposure, showing significant psychosocial impacts. Our work extends theories of news effects beyond crisis-centric frameworks by demonstrating that routine consumption creates distinct psychological dynamics depending on engagement type, and bears implications for tools and interventions for mitigating the psychosocial costs of news consumption on social media.
Paper Structure (30 sections, 4 figures, 3 tables)

This paper contains 30 sections, 4 figures, 3 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Data
  4. Compiling Treated Dataset
  5. Compiling Control Dataset
  6. Methods
  7. Operationalizing Psychosocial Outcomes
  8. Affective Outcomes
  9. Behavioral Outcomes
  10. Cognitive Outcomes
  11. Matching for Causal Inference
  12. Covariates
  13. Stratified Propensity Score Matching
  14. Quality of Matching
  15. Relative Treatment Effect
  16. ...and 15 more sections

Figures (4)

  • Figure 1: A schematic figure showing our causal-inference approach to analyze users' Bluesky timeline.
  • Figure 2: Distribution of a) treatment/placebo dates, b) propensity scores, and b) standardized mean differences (SMD) across the Treated and Control users' datasets.
  • Figure 3: Aggregated relative treatment effects (RTE) on psychosocial outcomes measured over two months following exposure.
  • Figure 4: RTEs of LIWC cognitive and social attributes.