There is a popular rule of thumb about social media: scrolling in silence is bad for you, but posting and chatting is good. A new study suggests the second half of that rule may be wrong.
Researchers followed nearly 7,000 Dutch adults for nine years. They found that both kinds of use, quiet scrolling and active posting, were linked to people feeling lonelier over time. The paper, “The Epidemic of Loneliness”, is by James A. Roberts, Phil D. Young, and Meredith E. David.
A note on what follows. We are writers reading research, not psychologists or clinicians. The study below is observational. It tracks patterns across a population over time rather than proving cause and effect, and a pattern that holds across thousands of people is not a diagnosis of any one reader’s relationship with their phone.
For years the working idea in this corner of psychology has been a tidy split: active use good, passive use bad. Posting, commenting, and messaging were supposed to build connection. Silent scrolling was supposed to wear it away.
Roberts and his colleagues set out to test it against a long, real-world dataset rather than a single snapshot.
Anyone who has caught themselves scrolling a feed for twenty minutes without once tapping a button, then felt oddly emptier for it, already knows the passive half of this idea from the inside. The active half is what the study complicates.
What nine years of data actually showed
The team used the Dutch LISS panel, a survey that has collected data from Dutch households every year since 2008. They analysed 6,965 adults over nine years, from 2014 to 2022. The average participant was around 50 years old, older than the college students who fill much of this research.
Passive use behaved as expected: more scrolling without interacting went hand in hand with rising loneliness.
The surprise was active use. Active use was also linked to loneliness climbing over the years. As Roberts put it, “While social media offers unprecedented access to online communities, it appears that extensive use—whether active or passive—does not alleviate feelings of loneliness and may, in fact, intensify them.”
The loop that runs both ways
Perhaps the study’s most interesting finding is about direction. Instead of treating social media only as a cause, the researchers looked at whether loneliness and use feed each other.
They found a two-way relationship. Feeling lonely led to more social media use later on, and more use led to more loneliness in turn — less a one-way street than a spiral.
Roberts is careful about what this means. “Lonely people turn to social media to address their feelings,” he told reporters, “but it is possible that such social media use merely fans the flames of loneliness.” The “it is possible” is doing real work in that sentence: the study can show two things rising together over years, but it cannot pin down exactly what is causing what.
Against that uncertainty sits a stark comparison. The US Surgeon General has compared a lack of social connection to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Against that backdrop, a tool sold as a cure for isolation possibly deepening it is not a small footnote.
What this changes about the conversation
The neat advice, use social media “actively” and you’ll be fine, looks harder to defend after nine years of Dutch data.
That does not mean, however, every way of using these platforms is the same. Roberts keeps the door open: “But we also know that it is not simply a matter of more social media use leading to poorer health outcomes—it might make a difference how that social media is used,” he said.
His larger hunch is blunter, offered as opinion rather than proof: “I think the major takeaway from our study should be that social media use is a poor substitute for person-to-person interaction,” he said.
A few caveats. The study relies on people reporting their own use and their own loneliness, and people are not always accurate about either. It is one paper, not a final verdict, and it describes a Dutch population over a specific stretch of time. Its strength is the length of the record and the size of the sample, not a controlled experiment that isolates a single cause.
If any of this lands close to home, and the pull toward the feed feels like it is keeping you company more than it is keeping you connected, a qualified counsellor or therapist is a good person to talk to.
The researchers are clear about what they have not resolved. The two-way relationship they describe, loneliness and use each nudging the other upward, is a part that needs further study. The spiral is visible in the data; which way it turns first, and whether it can be turned the other way, is what they leave open.
