Unpacking the negative welfare effect of social media: Evidence from a large scale nationally representative time-use survey in China

Recently, concerns have been raised on the adverse impacts of social media on people's subjective well-being. Using a large and representative sample of Chinese individuals, we explore the effects of social media browsing and social media communication on users' life satisfaction. The results show that while social media browsing has a strong negative impact on users' subjective well-being, there is no significant impact generated by social media communication. The relative income and social comparison are the main drivers of the result. The negative impact of social media browsing is more pronounced for low-income people than for high-income people. We do not find support for other possible mechanisms like information cocoons of information fragmentation.