In fact, the company has reversed a troubling trend in its most important market: Facebook added users in North America for the first time all year. And the people who took a break from Facebook continued to use the platform less often, even after the experiment ended. “Our study offers the largest-scale experimental evidence available to date on the way Facebook affects a range of individual and social welfare measures,” the researchers wrote. And while people are less informed about the news when they are away from Facebook, it also cooled partisan thinking. The 2,844 Facebook users involved in the study, which took place in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, was not a fully representative sample, the study said.

Source: Washington Post January 31, 2019 15:38 UTC