How Does Social Media Affect Well-Being? High-Intensity TikTok Users Spend Time on App Late at Night, Affecting Sleep Patterns

Social media platforms have become very popular, raising concerns among health care professionals, educators, parents, and policymakers about their effects on well-being. In a new study, researchers investigated the behavioral changes associated with TikTok use, with a focus on its impact on screen time, phone use, and sleep. The study found a significant rise in overall screen time after users adopted TikTok, especially late at night, as well as shifts in sleep patterns for high-intensity users. The authors suggest ways for platform designers to help mitigate negative effects.

The study, by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the Indian School of Business, is a working paper.

“The U.S. Surgeon General has called for warning labels on social media platforms to remind users of their adverse impacts,” says Uttara Madurai Ananthakrishnan, assistant professor of information systems at Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz College, who coauthored the study. “But despite the accusations against these platforms by lawmakers across the United States, causal evidence linking social media use to objective indicators of well-being remains elusive.”

Short-form video platforms like TikTok have become immensely popular since their launch in 2016; TikTok now has more than a billion monthly active users globally, including 120 million in the United States. Unlike traditional platforms, which tend to be built around users’ social network, TikTok’s primary way of delivering content is via its “For You” feed, which curates videos using a personalized and sophisticated algorithm, prioritizing engagement metrics (e.g., watch time and interactions over users’ social connections) and making content discovery less about who users know and more about what holds their attention.

This creates a “lean-back” consumption experience in which users are continuously served new content without needing to actively search or follow other users. As a result, TikTok is very immersive and can quickly move users from passive viewing to prolonged engagement. This study was based on a market intelligence firm’s comprehensive mobile use data set of about 250,000 adult Android users in the United States. Users opted in with consent in exchange for compensation and installed the firm’s app on their phones, which tracked their app use. The study leveraged detailed smartphone touch stream data from nearly 7,000 U.S. TikTok adopters from 2019 to 2021, capturing every interaction users had with their phones over many months. Based on this information, the study also examined users’ daily sleep patterns.

Adoption of TikTok led to an average increase of 221 minutes per week in overall screen time for the heaviest users, and 43 minutes per week for medium users in the six weeks after they began using the platform. These effects were highest late at night (from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m.) and entirely attributable to TikTok itself, with users’ screen time on non-TikTok social media and gaming apps declining, suggesting that TikTok replaced other forms of screen time.

Although the study did not measure sleep quality directly, its data allowed researchers to infer sleep duration, as well as when users went to sleep and woke up. While there was no effect of TikTok adoption on sleep patterns of low-intensity users, among high-intensity users, sleep patterns shifted in a variety of ways, including delayed bedtimes and a moderate reduction in the duration of sleep. The authors call this finding concerning given that late-night smartphone use has been tied to various mental health disorders. Finally, among the heaviest users, the overall number of “pick-ups”—the number of times a phone screen is actively turned on—declined sharply after users adopted TikTok, despite the significant rise in overall screen time. This suggests that users were engaging with TikTok for longer periods during each session.

To reduce the harm of high-intensity TikTok use, the study’s authors make several recommendations for platform designers, including implementing session-length limits, restricting nighttime use, and providing behavioral nudges (e.g., reminders after a certain period of use that may help users moderate their time more effectively).

Among the study’s limitations, the authors note the complexity of measuring the net effect of TikTok use on individuals’ wellness and point out that they did not observe users’ actions within any of the apps in their data, but rather focused on some components of social media use. In addition, they did not assess the impact of other social media platforms and their study was based on a self-selected panel, which limits the generalizability of their findings.

“Our results underscore the potential effects on well-being of heavy use of short-form video platforms,” suggests Saharsh Agarwal, assistant professor of information systems at the Indian School of Business, who led the study; Agarwal is an alumna of the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon. “Our analysis also provides clear evidence of substitutability between TikTok and traditional social media platforms, which has immediate implications for ongoing antitrust proceedings.”

###

Summarized from a working paper, Social Media and Well-Being: Impact of TikTok on Screentime and Sleep Patterns, by Agarwal, S (Indian School of Business), and Ananthakrishnan, UM (Carnegie Mellon University). Copyright 2024. All rights reserved. 

About Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy
The Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy is home to two internationally recognized graduate-level institutions at Carnegie Mellon University: the School of Information Systems and Management and the School of Public Policy and Management. This unique colocation combined with its expertise in analytics set Heinz College apart in the areas of cybersecurity, health care, the future of work, smart cities, and arts & entertainment. In 2016, INFORMS named Heinz College the #1 academic program for Analytics Education. For more information, please visit www.heinz.cmu.edu.