I think different social media can trigger depression in different ways. TikTok/...

giraffe_lady · on Dec 28, 2022

It doesn't have to be any characteristic of facebook itself which I think a lot of the comments here are missing. A depressed person addicted to anything will become more depressed.

Having spent a lot of time in addiction recovery spaces, addiction and depression have astoundingly high comorbidity, to the point where much of the time it's hard to tell where one begins and the other ends, which came first in a given person.

There probably are specifics of a social media addiction that are relevant to how it affects users in depression. But that's true of all addiction as well, they all have relevant specifics.

Facebook is the longest-running of our major social networks and the first one where most people really understood that something had fundamentally changed about the world because of it, so it is the most studied. And studies take time, so we have a larger body of research on it specifically. I can almost guarantee that similar findings will obtain about other social media platforms, regardless of their individual dynamics or character.

steveBK123 · on Dec 28, 2022

I think IG for example creates enough FOMO in even non-depressed people as to induce some amount of depression adjacent symptoms. Ultimate "keeping up with the Joneses" kind of thing.

nradov · on Dec 28, 2022

Nah. I don't see many miserable people in my Facebook feed. It's all just a matter of who your friends are. If you're friends with miserable people and like their posts then those are going to fill your feed.

steveBK123 · on Dec 28, 2022

I think FB is where you realize which of the real-world people you know through family or friends are absolutely insane.