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AP, HELSINKI
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Heavy social media use contributes to a stark decline in well-being among young people, with the effects particularly worrying in teenage girls in English-speaking countries and western Europe, said the World Happiness Report, which was published yesterday.
Taiwan was 26th in the report, which ranks 147 states, giving the nation a “life evaluation” of 6.714.
Taiwan last year was ranked 27th globally with a score of 6.669.
A woman walks past Helsinki Cathedral on May 29, 2023.
Photo: AP
The annual report, published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, showed that Finland is the happiest land in the world for the ninth year in a row, with other Nordic countries such as Iceland (second), Denmark (third), Sweden (fifth) and Norway (sixth) ranking among the top 10.
However, it highlighted how life evaluations among people younger than 25 in New Zealand (11th), Australia (15th), the US (23rd) and Canada (25th) and have dropped significantly over the past decade, and suggested that long hours spent scrolling through social media is a key factor in that trend.
A new entry to the top five is Costa Rica, which climbed to fourth place this year after rising through the ranks from 23rd place in 2023.
The report attributes that to well-being boosts from family bonds and other social connections.
“We think it’s because of the quality of their social lives and the stability that they currently enjoy,” said Jan-Emmanuel de Neve, an Oxford economics professor who directs the Wellbeing Research Centre and coedits the World Happiness Report.
“Latin America more generally has strong family ties, strong social ties, a great level of social capital, as a sociologist would call it, more so than in other places,” De Neve said.
The others in the top 10 were: the Netherlands (seventh), Israel (eighth), Luxembourg (ninth) and Switzerland (10th).
Finland and the other northern European countries’ steady ranking on top is related to a combination of wealth, its equal distribution, having a welfare state that protects people from the risks of recessions and a healthy life expectancy, the report said.
As in previous years, nations in or near zones of major conflict remain at the foot of the rankings. Afghanistan is ranked as the unhappiest country again, with Malawi and Sierra Leone 145th and 146th respectively.
Country rankings were based on answers given by about 100,000 people in 140 countries and territories who were asked to rate their own lives. The study was done in partnership with analytics firm Gallup and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
In most countries, approximately 1,000 people are contacted by telephone or face-to-face each year.
Respondents were asked to evaluate their lives on a scale from 0 to 10. Among people younger than 25 in English-speaking and western European countries, that score dropped by almost 1 point over the past decade.
The report said the negative correlation between well-being and extensive social media use is particularly concerning among teenage girls.
For example, 15-year-old girls who use social media for five hours or more reported a drop in life satisfaction, compared with others who use it less, it said.
Young people who use social media for less than one hour per day report the highest levels of well-being, researchers said, higher than those who do not use social media at all.
However, adolescents are spending an estimated average of 2.5 hours a day on social media, they said.
“It is clear that we should look as much as possible to put the ‘social’ back into social media,” De Neve said.
Researchers said that in some parts of the world, such as the Middle East and South America, the links between social media use and well-being are more positive — and well-being among young people has not fallen despite heavy social media use.
The report said this is due to many factors that differ between continents, but added that heavy social media use in some countries is an important contributing factor to the decline in youth well-being.
It said the most problematic platforms are those with algorithmic feeds, feature influencers and where the main material is visual, because they encourage social comparisons.
Those who use platforms that mainly facilitate communication do better, it said.
Additional reporting by staff writer
