An internal investigation by Facebook revealed that one in eight users reported that using the social network impairs sleep, work, relationships and parenting, according to the documents of the 'The Wall Street Journal'.
The report's researchers estimated that these problems affect about 12,5% of Facebook's more than 2,9 billion users – the equivalent of more than 360 million people.
In the document, experts said the findings were a result of users' compulsive use of the application, reflecting what is generally known as “internet addiction,” according to the US newspaper.
This report is based on internal documents, released by the former Facebook employee who became a whistleblower, Frances Hagen.
The researchers also found that the mental health of teenage users is negatively affected by using the company's Instagram photo and video sharing app.
BUT: Welcome to Meta!!!
The WSJ also says the survey was launched several years ago by a Facebook team focused on mitigating harmful behaviors, and where the team suggested a number of fixes and, although the company has implemented some, the team subsequently closed down in 2019, having shared their findings in an internal presentation in March 2020.
Researchers also found that some users “have no control over their time on Facebook” which subsequently brings them problems in their lives.
These problems include a “loss of productivity when people stop completing tasks to check Facebook frequently, a loss of sleep when staying up late, navigating the app, and degradation of personal relationships when people replace time together with time online”, can be read in the documents that the newspaper had access to.
Facebook has already publicly reacted to this report, describing them as “irresponsible, because, as noted in the study itself, the research was designed to be as comprehensive as possible to help us better understand the challenge".
"Problematic use is not the same as addiction,” said Facebook Research Director Pratiti Raychoudhury. "Problematic usage has been used to describe people's relationship with many technologies, such as TVs and smartphones”, He explained.
Raychoudhury denied that Facebook had stopped investigating the impact of its own technologies and other technologies on user well-being.
The responsible also added that the company launched “almost 10 products” to support the healthy use of their Facebook apps, and that compulsive use was an issue that affected several companies.
"Although a causal relationship between social networking and addiction has not been found, overall, research suggests that, on average, Facebook does not have a large detrimental impact on well-being.”, he defended.
