Online social integration is associated with reduced mortality risk

Abstract

Social interactions increasingly take place online. Friendships and other offline social ties have been repeatedly associated with human longevity, but online interactions might have different properties. Here, we reference 12 million social media profiles against California Department of Public Health vital records and use longitudinal statistical models to assess whether social media use is associated with longer life. The results show that receiving requests to connect as friends online is associated with reduced mortality but initiating friendships is not. Additionally, online behaviors that indicate face-to-face social activity (like posting photos) are associated with reduced mortality, but online-only behaviors (like sending messages) have a nonlinear relationship, where moderate use is associated with the lowest mortality. These results suggest that online social integration is linked to lower risk for a wide variety of critical health problems. Although this is an associational study, it may be an important step in understanding how, on a global scale, online social networks might be adapted to improve modern populations' social and physical health.social networks | social media | health | longevity | social support P eople with more friends and more social ties in their community tend to live longer (1-4). Many researchers interpret this association as evidence that greater social support and social network integration lead to better health outcomes (4). For example, social integration is thought to improve health by motivating engagement in healthy behaviors (5, 6), improving immunity (7), and reducing inflammation (8). However, nearly all of this work has been conducted in the context of real-world, face-to-face social interactions. As more and more people use online social media to maintain friendships (as of June 2016, about 1.1 billion people use Facebook daily), an open question is whether or not this new context can be used to measure real world social activity and, distinctly, whether online social interactions are similarly associated with better health and increased human longevity.Many researchers have shown that online access to friends promotes real world social activities (9). This finding suggests that online social media may increase the amount of overall social integration. To the extent that people use social media to coordinate and engage in healthy face-to-face social behavior, we might therefore expect a positive relationship between online use and health. However, it may also be the case that spending time on social media reduces the amount of time available for offline socializing. If so, then social media use might be more like watching television, which tends to crowd out social activity and, along with other forms of sedentary behavior, has been associated with worse health outcomes (10). Of course, because social media use is not randomly assigned, use might also be a proxy for other unmeasured traits.To help adjudicate whether online social media use has a positive or negati...

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