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An interesting paper was trending on X this week, and after reading its abstract, I thought it would be a good idea to share it with you.
Stanford paid 35,000 people to delete Facebook and Instagram for six weeks. They tracked everyone's phones with passive monitoring, so nobody could lie about what they were actually doing with the free time. They published the results.
Largest social media experiment in history.
When people deleted Instagram, they freed up about 20 minutes a day. Almost every single one of those minutes went straight to a different app. TikTok. YouTube. Twitter. Snapchat. Their total screen time barely moved.
The thumb just kept scrolling. When you close Instagram, you open TikTok
I tested this myself in late 2024. Deleted Instagram off my phone. Lasted about a month. And the whole time, I just scrolled X more. Then YouTube Shorts. Then Reddit (yeah I know, Reddit, but the AI subs are actually decent these days).
My total time on phone? Roughly the same as before. Maybe a little higher.
Felt productive for like three days. Then everything leveled out.
When this study came out, it explained exactly what I had already experienced, just backed by 35,000 people and real tracking instead of one person’s story.
For Facebook, the effect wasn’t as strong. People saved 37 minutes a day, but only about 9 minutes were actually spent offline. So most of that time just shifted to other apps. For Instagram? Almost all of it. No real drop in total screen time.
Now stop and think about what this means for the entire public conversation we've been having for a decade.
The message has always been: put the phone down. Touch grass. Read a book. The phone is the cigarette and quitting it is the goal. Surgeons general have written reports. States have sued TikTok. Jonathan Haidt built a whole book and a movement on it.
But this study suggests the framing is wrong. Or at least seriously incomplete.
Quitting Instagram doesn't put the phone down. It opens TikTok. And whatever Instagram was doing to your nervous system, TikTok is probably doing too. Maybe with different flavour. Same outcome.
The apps aren't identical, sure. But your brain doesn't seem to know the difference between "scrolling Instagram" and "scrolling TikTok" the way the policy debate assumes it does.
The emotional improvement from quitting was real, but very small. About 0.06 for Facebook, and 0.04 for Instagram. A typical therapy session, on average, gives around 0.27. So this is roughly one-fifth of that.
Not nothing. But also not the apocalypse-on-pause we've been promised.
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Where the panic isn't wrong
Now I want to be careful here. Because it's easy to dunk on the overall panic and miss the part that's actually true.
There's one finding in this study that absolutely deserves attention. And it confirms something a lot of people have been saying for years.
Women aged 18 to 24. When they deleted Instagram, their emotional state improved by 0.111 standard deviations. Almost three times the average effect across the entire sample. Statistically separate from every other group in the study.
Young men of the same age? Almost zero. Women over 25? Smaller effect. Men over 25? Smaller again.
The thing parents and teachers and teenage girls themselves have been saying for a decade.. that Instagram is specifically rough on young women.. shows up clean in the data. The largest experiment ever done on this question basically confirms it.
This finding got missed in earlier research because previous studies were too small to spot it. With 35,000 people, you can finally see what 1,500 people couldn't.
So the panic isn't entirely wrong. It's just narrower than how it gets sold.
Instagram isn't destroying everyone. It's specifically hard on young women. And the reason is probably the thing it's always been. The comparison loop. The body stuff. A feed full of girls who look effortless and aren't.
For Facebook, the bigger effects appear in people over 35. Probably because, for them, Facebook is mostly politics and family drama. And this study happened during the 2020 US election. Even the researchers point this out. The same study in a non-election year might look very different.
The honest version is simple: specific apps, in specific situations, affect specific groups in different ways. Everything else is mostly noise.
My take
I think we picked the wrong villain. Or more honestly, we made the villain too big.
The dominant story has been "social media is the problem." But this study points at something else. The problem is compulsive scrolling. Social media is just one of many ways to do it.
If your phone is your default escape from boredom, anxiety, awkward silences, hard feelings, the moment between two tasks.. then deleting Instagram doesn't fix anything. The thumb still scrolls. It just scrolls a different app. The hole gets filled in an hour.
And this is uncomfortable for everyone.
Uncomfortable for platforms, because they can’t just take all the blame (the fact that many people struggle even when alone says a lot). Uncomfortable for regulators, because there’s no single app they can simply ban. And uncomfortable for the rest of us, because it suggests the real work is internal, not external.
Nobody can ban the thumb.
The other thing I keep getting stuck on is how platforms are responding to the findings about young women. There’s a 35,000-person study with passive tracking. The platforms know. Academics know. Policymakers know.
And the response so far? A few screen time reminders and some cosmetic settings.
I’m not someone who jumps to regulation as the first answer. Most tech regulation I’ve seen is made by people who don’t really understand the technology they’re trying to regulate. But when a result this clear shows up, for a group this specific, and the answer is “we’ll add a notification”… that’s not a serious response.
So I’m walking away from this paper with two things in my head at the same time.
First, the broader panic around social media is exaggerated. The average effect is real, but small. And you can’t fix phone addiction just by switching apps.
Second, the concern about Instagram and young women is more real than I used to think. And the platforms are mostly acting like it doesn’t exist.
Both of these are true. Neither is convenient.
And honestly? I think that's exactly why this study got buried. Because it doesn't let any side win the argument. The pro-platform people can't use it because of the young women finding. The anti-platform people can't use it because the average effect is small and the thumb just moves to the next app.
It just complicates everyone's story.
The most honest takeaway is also the most boring one. The app you delete matters less than the muscle that reaches for it. And nobody knows how to fix that muscle at scale.
If you've ever quit a social media app, what actually happened in your second week? Did you genuinely feel better.. or did you just open something else and pretend?
If you made it this far, you're not a casual reader. You actually think about this stuff.
So here's my ask. If this article made you think, even a little, share it with one person. Just one. Someone who's in the AI space. Someone who reads. Someone who would actually sit with these ideas instead of scrolling past them.
That's how this newsletter grows. Not through ads or algorithms. Through you sending it to someone and saying "read this."
