What the data actually shows
A central distinction in this research, associated with work by Moira Burke and Robert Kraut, is between active and passive use. Active use — directed, personal communication with people you know — tends to be associated with greater feelings of connection and support. Passive use — consuming others' content without interacting — tends to track with lower wellbeing. The platform is less the variable than the behaviour on it.
Social media also appears genuinely useful for maintaining friendships that distance or busyness would otherwise erode. Research on friendship maintenance and so-called weak ties suggests these tools can sustain long-distance relationships and keep looser connections warm, preserving a wider social network than people could easily maintain by other means.
On the other side, passive use is repeatedly linked to envy and downward shifts in mood, partly through the comparison mechanism: scrolling exposes you to a curated stream of other people's best moments, which tends to inflate how well you imagine others are doing. There is also a concern, supported by some research, that screen-based interaction can displace deeper in-person time rather than only adding to it.
Why this feels different from how it actually is
Social media can feel like it is keeping you connected even when it is mostly keeping you informed. Passively watching a friend's updates produces a sense of being in touch, but it is not the same as the back-and-forth that actually builds closeness — and the gap between feeling connected and being connected is easy to miss from the inside.
It also feels different because the comparison is constant and one-sided. You see friends' highlights far more often and in far more detail than you once would have, which tends to make their lives look fuller and easier than yours. That steady curated input nudges perception in a predictable direction, independent of what is actually going on in anyone's life.
And the design rewards passive scrolling. The frictionless, endless feed makes lurking the path of least resistance, while the more effortful, connection-building behaviour — actually reaching out to a specific person — takes a deliberate choice. So the default behaviour tends to be the one the research associates with the worse outcomes.
The same platform can do either, depending largely on the behaviour.
What the research says to do about it
The clearest implication of the active-versus-passive findings is to use the tools to interact rather than to consume. Directing your time toward messages, comments, and real exchanges with people you know is the pattern associated with feeling more connected; passive scrolling is the pattern associated with the opposite.
The maintenance research suggests social media is genuinely well suited to keeping long-distance and weaker ties alive — using it as a bridge to relationships you could not otherwise sustain, rather than as a substitute for the close ones you could see in person, plays to its actual strength.
Because passive use is the one linked to envy and lower mood, reducing aimless scrolling specifically — rather than quitting altogether — is what the pattern in the research points toward. The goal supported by the evidence is shifting the mix from consuming to interacting, not necessarily logging off entirely.
What the research says does not help
Treating passive scrolling as if it were connection does not appear to help, and may quietly substitute for the active, in-person, or direct contact that actually builds closeness. Watching a friend's life unfold in a feed can feel like staying in touch while doing little of the work that friendship relies on.
Assuming the platform itself is uniformly good or bad misses the main finding. The research suggests outcomes hinge on how it is used; blaming or crediting the tool as a whole tends to obscure the active-versus-passive distinction that actually predicts the difference.
Using social media as a replacement for, rather than a supplement to, deeper connection is the pattern the displacement research flags. Where screen time crowds out in-person time with close friends, the evidence suggests that trade tends to come at a cost rather than being a neutral swap.
Passively watching a friend's updates produces a sense of being in touch, but it is not the same as the back-and-forth that actually builds closeness.
What this looks like in real life
Same app, two different hours
One evening is spent replying to a friend's message, swapping voice notes, and making a plan to meet — direct, personal interaction. Another is spent silently scrolling a feed of acquaintances' highlights without a single exchange. Same platform, opposite behaviours: the first is the active pattern the research links to feeling connected, the second the passive pattern linked to lower mood and envy.
The long-distance friendship that survives
A friendship that would quietly fade under distance and busy schedules stays warm through occasional messages, shared posts, and small check-ins. This is social media playing to its actual strength — a bridge that sustains weaker and long-distance ties a person could not easily maintain otherwise — rather than a substitute for the close friends they could see in person.
Real numbers in context
This is an area where it is wise to favour the direction of the findings over precise figures, because effects vary across studies and populations and the research is still evolving. The robust, repeated pattern is the active-versus-passive split: active, personalised use is associated with greater connection, while passive consumption is associated with lower wellbeing and more envy.
Alongside that, the maintenance research consistently suggests social media is good at sustaining long-distance and weak-tie friendships that would otherwise fade — a real benefit — while passive use fuels comparison and can displace deeper contact. Rather than a single statistic, the honest summary is conditional: it helps or hurts your friendships depending mostly on whether you use it to interact or to scroll.