The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to decide several cases on the regulation of social media platforms, raising questions about the limits of free speech and the internet’s capacity to spread information that can cause harm. The European Union already compels internet companies to filter content promoting hateful or terrorist ideologies.
Yet during the pandemic, which deepened parallel crises of loneliness and mental health, another discussion about social media has been gaining momentum – one that may help curb the effects of disinformation not by limiting freedom, but by expanding it. That discussion requires a different metric: happiness.
Take, for example, a study published by Nature journal’s Scientific Reports last week. It found that an uptick in bicycling during and since the pandemic, more as a means of transportation than exercise, has an unanticipated social dividend. By breaking isolation and contributing to environmental well-being, it has made people happier.
A similar “simple and profound conclusion” has emerged in a Harvard University survey that has been running continuously since 1938. The study’s directors, Professors Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, note that prior to the pandemic the average American spent 11 hours a day engaged in solitary activities such as media consumption. That number likely rose during the isolation of COVID-19. Breaking those isolating habits, they wrote in the Atlantic, amounts to a kind of social fitness. “Good relationships lead to health and happiness,” they wrote. “The trick is that those relationships must be nurtured.”
Gianna Biscontini, a behavioral scientist, agrees. Her decision to leave social media, she wrote in Newsweek, has resulted in stronger relationships, more curiosity, and balance. “These days, I call my friends,” she wrote. “Sometimes they answer and sometimes they don’t. But when they do … I find myself smiling and excited to speak to them – a feeling I never experienced with social media.”
The internet cases before the Supreme Court may result in a profound turning point for free speech in the digital era. Or not. But statistics pointing to a leveling off or even modest decline in social media use, coupled with large-scale layoffs at companies like Meta (Facebook) and Google, hint at shifting social attitudes about individual and civic health. Self-government based on discretion, selflessness, and caring needs no further restraint. Its outcome can be joy instead of social division.