上Facebook时间太长容易抑郁，研究人员正在努力寻找解决方案

几年前，Facebook的一组研究人员发现，用户在不停浏览Facebook的动态推送后自我感觉会更糟。于是他们决定做点什么。

他们研究了Facebook用户使用社交网络时的情绪反应。相关成果推动Facebook做出了迄今为止最大的改变之一：更多地向用户显示来自于朋友和家人的动态，而不是企业动态。

目的是为了增加用户间的评论点赞等互动。研究发现，人们互动越多，感觉就越好。

这项变革的背后是Facebook鲜为人知的幸福团队，除此之外，他们还在多个领域里进行了探索。Facebook在现代生活中几乎无处不在，该团队的使命是减少Facebook可能对用户造成的任何不良影响。

“我加入Facebook，是因为我想让我的研究在日常应用中产生更多的影响。”幸福团队的研究经理詹妮弗·瓜达尼奥说，“我希望我的学术研究能够直接对人们产生影响，但似乎还未达到目标。”

Facebook和其他社交媒体服务面临着激烈的批评，称它们强化了成瘾行为，造成了用户的自卑感和孤独感等，这项研究变得越来越重要。此外，还有声音批评社交媒体上的霸凌行为，加强监管的呼声不断高涨。

该团队的目标是解决科技行业日益严峻的难题——如何积极影响用户的生活，眼前却面临重大挑战。多年来，各项独立研究均表明，使用Facebook会增加抑郁，让用户对自己的生活更不满意。

今年早些时候，外部研究人员的一项研究发现，在停用Facebook账户后，人们更快乐、更满足，焦虑和抑郁也减少了。这与Facebook的首席执行官马克·扎克伯格的说法形成了鲜明对比，他经常吹嘘Facebook是连接世界的关键工具。

“研究明确表明，确实存在问题。”斯坦福大学的教授马修·根茨科说，他与其他三位教授共同开展了这项研究。

同样，耶鲁大学和加州大学圣迭戈分校的研究人员2017年在《美国流行病学杂志》（American Journal of Epidemiology）上发表的一项研究表明，用户对Facebook的使用越多，心理健康和个人满意度就越差。

虽然这些批评听起来很刺耳，但Facebook的研究人员表示，他们能够理解。

“批评者和我们一样，都十分关注人们的幸福感。”主攻Facebook社会科学研究的研究科学家莫伊拉·伯克说，“我们追求的是同样的东西。”

除了推动Facebook去年改变了推送动态的算法，该小组还助力Facebook开发了其他新功能，其中一项是为用户设立专门页面纪念所爱之人，另一个允许用户暂时隐藏特定好友的帖子,这样他们就无需看到前任的更新，诸如此类。

该团队还在探索，如何让Facebook帮助最近搬到某一个新城市的人结识新朋友，探索新社区。研究人员还在寻找有效的方法，避免用户在和朋友们经常发布的理想生活——满面笑容的婴儿、充满异域风情的假期——进行比较后，自我感觉更糟。

该团队向Facebook管理层提出的任何建议都只不过是建议。后者对采取什么措施拥有最终决定权。

雪城大学研究社交媒体内容监管问题的助理教授詹妮弗·格里吉尔表示，这就是问题所在。仇恨言论、暴力内容和骚扰如此普遍，Facebook已经跟不上了。虽然用户可能会抱怨，但没有任何规定要求Facebook做出改变，解决这些问题或其他任何问题。

“他们都是公司，对股东和利润负责。”格里吉尔说，“他们说想帮助我们，说他们正在采取恰当措施保护我们，但他们没有做到，也没有足够的资源做到。”

格里吉尔说，Facebook内部研究存在的问题可以归结为：“只要马克·扎克伯格还是公司的大股东，就没有什么能够真正独立。”

幸福小组希望通过将学术标准应用到工作中来改变人们的这种观点，比如通过在权威的同行评审期刊上发表论文。最终，研究人员表示，他们正以他们知道的唯一方式解决Facebook的问题：学术渠道。

该研究小组的成立大致可以追溯到2009年，当时伯克以研究员的身份加入了Facebook，开始研究Facebook对用户幸福感的影响。该公司称，这个团队目前已经增长为“几十人”。

许多团队成员都有多年学术背景。例如，瓜达尼奥拥有杜克大学的心理学博士学位，她的专业是正念对幸福感的影响；伯克是卡内基梅隆大学的人机交互学博士。

Facebook的研究人员将“幸福感”定义为“人们如何看待自己的生活”。在这个范围内，他们主要关注三个特定的领域：用户花在Facebook上的不健康时间、孤独感、与他人对比后导致自我评价降低。

Facebook的瓜达尼奥说：“这些问题对人们的生活产生了深远影响，已经在Facebook上充分显现。”

该团队利用之前发表的学术研究作为辅助研究工具，已经根据针对Facebook的研究发表了10多篇论文。他们还依靠Facebook用户作为其研究对象，有时长达数个月。

一项研究表明，人们并不是因为使用Facebook而感到孤独；他们只是在感到孤独时使用Facebook。他们的研究结果表明，Facebook是解决方案，而不是问题所在。

这些研究人员还经常与来自大学、非营利组织和其他组织的专家合作。在某些情况下，这些局外人的加入提供了一个独立的视角。

但考虑到社交媒体的长期影响尚不清楚，这项研究仍然不算完整。毕竟，Facebook面世才15年。随着Facebook的研究人员了解的更多，他们认为公司将根据新的研究成果进一步调整其产品。

“在Facebook，我们一直专注于深入理解社交媒体和技术改善或贬低人们生活的方式，并随着我们了解的深入不断对产品做出改变。”主管研究的副总裁戴维·金斯伯格说，“我们的目标——所做研究和所开发产品的目标，都是为了确保人们在该平台上花费的时间是有意义的。”

这似乎与公司高层产生了共鸣。

去年12月，扎克伯格强调，公司十分重视对用户整体幸福感产生的影响。可以说，这是他首次公开承认Facebook对该问题的关注。

“2018年，就我个人而言，面临的挑战在于解决Facebook社区面临的一些最重要的问题——包括防止干预选举，停止仇恨言论和虚假消息的传播，确保用户对自己的信息拥有管控权，确保我们的服务有助于提升幸福感。”他在Facebook上的一篇文章中说。

在去年的年报中，幸福感也被加入到公司面临的风险因素中。Facebook表示，如果用户觉得社交网络对他们的幸福感产生了负面影响，整体业务都可能受到损害。

“公司一直很关注幸福感。”Facebook的幸福产品经理钱德拉·莫汉·亚纳基拉曼说道，“不同的是，我们对公司产品影响的认识发生了改变。”（财富中文网）

译者：Agatha

A couple of years ago, a group of researchers at Facebook realized that users felt worse about themselves after incessantly scrolling through their news feeds. The researchers decided to do something about it.

They surveyed Facebook users about their emotional reactions to using the social network. Those findings helped drive one of the biggest changes Facebook has made to date: Showing users more posts from friends and family rather than businesses.

The point was to increase interaction between users, whether commenting or liking posts. The more that people did so, the better they felt, the research found.

The change pushed by Facebook’s little-known well-being team is just one of many issues the group has explored. Its mission is to reduce any negative effects associated with using Facebook, a nearly ubiquitous presence in modern life.

“I came to Facebook because I wanted to have more applied impact with my research,” said Jennifer Guadagno, a research manager for the well-being team. “I felt that my academic research was a few steps more removed from directly impacting people than I personally desired.”

The research is becoming increasingly important as Facebook along with other social media services face intense criticism for exacerbating behavior like addiction and contributing to low self-esteem and loneliness. Those critiques, among a host of others like bullying on the service, are helping fuel calls for more oversight.

The team has a major challenge ahead as it aims to solve a growing conundrum within the tech industry: How to positively impact users’ lives. And over the years, various independent studies have shown that using Facebook can increase depression and make users feel less satisfied with their lives.

A study earlier this year by researchers unaffiliated with Facebook found that people who deactivated their Facebook accounts were happier and more satisfied and felt less anxious and depressed. It was in sharp contrast to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who often brags about Facebook being a critical tool for connecting the world.

“It certainly says there’s an issue there that needs to be addressed, ” said Matthew Gentzkow, a professor at Stanford University who authored the study along with three other professors.

Similarly, a study by researchers at Yale and the University of California at San Diego published in the American Journal of Epidemiology in 2017 suggested that the more people used Facebook, the worse their mental health and personal satisfaction.

While the criticism may be painful to hear, Facebook’s researchers said they understand it.

“The people who are critical about well-being care very much, just as we do,” said Moira Burke, research scientist who focuses on Facebook’s social science research. “We all want the same thing.”

In addition to championing the change to Facebook’s news feed algorithm last year, the team has also helped Facebook create a feature for users to honor loved ones with memorial pages and another that lets users temporarily hide specific friends’ posts so they don’t have to see updates from an ex-spouse, for example.

The team is also exploring how Facebook can help people who recently moved to a new city find new friends or to explore their new community. And researchers want to find ways to help people avoid feeling worse about themselves after comparing their lives to the often idealized ones of smiling babies and exotic vacations that friends invariably post.

Any suggestion the team makes to Facebook’s management is only that—a suggestion. Facebook’s leaders get the ultimate say about what should be adopted.

And that’s the problem, suggests Jennifer Grygiel, a Syracuse University assistant professor who has studied the problem of policing social media content. Hate speech, violent content, and harassment have become so widespread that Facebook can’t keep up. And while users may complain, Facebook is under no requirement to make any changes to address those problems or any others.

“These are corporate entities, and they’re accountable to their shareholders and their profits,” Grygiel said. “They say that they want to help us—that they are putting processes in place to protect us—but they aren’t and don’t have the resources in place to do that.”

The problem with Facebook’s internal research boils down to one thing, says Grygiel: “Nothing can truly be independent when Mark Zuckerberg is the majority shareholder of the company.”

The well-being team hopes it can change that impression by applying academic standards to their work, like publishing papers in well-respected peer-reviewed journals. Ultimately, the researchers say they are approaching Facebook’s problems the only way they know how: as scholars.

The team loosely dates back to 2009, when Burke, who joined Facebook that year as a researcher, began exploring Facebook’s effects on its users’ well-being. Since then, the team has grown to a “few dozen people,” according to the company.

Many of its members have lengthy academic backgrounds. For example, Guadagno has a Ph.D. in psychology from Duke, where she studied the effect of mindfulness on well-being; Burke received her Ph.D. in human-computer interaction from Carnie Mellon University.

Facebook’s researchers define the term “well-being” as “how people perceive their lives.” Within that scope, they focus on three specific areas: unhealthy amounts of time spent on Facebook, loneliness, and declines in self-worth related to users comparing themselves to others.

“These issues are things that have a deep impact on people lives and have played out on Facebook,” Facebook’s Guadagno said.

The team uses previously published academic research to aid it in its studies and has published more than 10 of its own papers based on research conducted at Facebook. The team also relies on Facebook users to serve as subjects for its studies, in some cases for months.

One study showed that people weren’t lonely because they used Facebook; rather they used Facebook when they were feeling lonely. In their findings, Facebook was a solution, not the problem.

The researchers also often team up with experts from universities, nonprofits, and other organizations. In some cases, those outsiders have embedded within Facebook to provide an independent perspective.

But the research is still incomplete considering that the long-term impact of social media is unknown. After all, Facebook has only been around for 15 years. As Facebook’s researchers learn more, they expect that company will tweak its products some more, based on new findings.

“At Facebook, we have been focused on deeply understanding the ways in which social media and technology can both improve and detract from people’s lives, and making product changes as we learn more,” said David Ginsberg, vice president of research. “Our goal, both with the research we do and the products we build, is to make sure that the quality of time people spend on the platform is meaningful.”

That message seems to have resonated with the company’s top executives.

In December, Zuckerberg highlighted the importance of the company’s effects on users’ overall well-being. Last year was arguably the first time he publicly acknowledged Facebook’s focus on the matter.

“For 2018, my personal challenge has been to focus on addressing some of the most important issues facing our community -- whether that’s preventing election interference, stopping the spread of hate speech and misinformation, making sure people have control of their information, and ensuring our services improve people’s well-being,” he said in a post on Facebook.

Well-being also shows up in one of the company’s risk factors in last year’s annual report. Facebook said that its overall business could be harmed if users felt that the social network was negatively affecting their well-being.

“The company has always cared about well-being,” said Chandra Mohan Janakiraman, Facebook’s well-being product manager. “What’s changed is our understanding in terms of the impact our product has had.”