A paper published in the official US Scientific Journal, PNAS, on Monday found out that time spent on social media could be associated with a longer life.
The research finds that people with more friends online are less likely to die than their disconnected counterparts. This paper contradicts the assertion that social media have a negative impact on human health.
The study’s material are detailed in the paper and, it was approved by three universities and US state review boards.
The paper asserts that asserts that the health effects of active online social lives largely mirror the benefits of busy offline social lives
But, skeptics doubt that Facebook was involved with the research paper.
William Hobbs, who conducted the research, worked as a Facebook research intern in 2013. Paper’s co-author Moira Burke worked as a research scientist in Facebook, New York Times reported.
Mr. Hobbs claimed that Facebook had not interfered with the result of the paper.
“We had some things in writing that they couldn’t interfere with the publication of the research no matter what the result was,” he told New York Times. He noted, though, that some at the company had been “pretty confident that we were going to find this result.”
The study was based on 12 million social media profiles provided by Facebook.
