Background
Social media is a relatively recent development. As of 2021, over 75% of adults in the United States are on a social media platform. That alone makes social media an interesting topic to study.
Most relevant to our work, there are reported correlations between social media use and poorer mental health. Many individuals worry that social media use causes poorer mental health, at least in some people. While we do not know if this is true, social media is also interesting from a research perspective because people openly talk about their mental health and some social media behaviors can clue you in to people’s mental health (e.g., when individuals discuss feeling sad). Moreover, we can make inferences about people mental health and emotions based on their behavior.
For example, in one study, we looked at the timing of activity on Twitter as an index of a person’s sleep/wake cycle. We found differences between Twitter users who reported being depressed and a random sample suggesting that people who were depressed were more active into the night and less active early in the morning.
