Many social media companies claim in their mission statements that one of their primary goals is to help people connect despite geographic and other barriers to connection. For example, Meta’s mission statement declares that they aim to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together,” and Discord’s mission statement is to “give people the power to create space to find belonging in their lives.”
Given that these platforms do make it possible to connect with others when they may not be able to be in the same physical location, these platforms might help people experience meaningful connections even under such dire circumstances as witnessed during the global pandemic we faced in recent years. In fact, social technologies helped people connect with others online during a time where it was dangerous for people to connect with others offline, and involvement with similar others on social media predicted lower loneliness and distress. In one report that Juliana Schroeder and I authored earlier this year, we also found correlational evidence showing that:
- people who report making meaningful connections with others online tend to be less lonely than people who do not make those meaningful connections online, and
- social communication services where people are more likely to make meaningful connections with other users tend to be the services with the lowest rates of loneliness among their users.
Therefore, it seems that these services have the potential to combat the decline of in-person socializing and mitigate some of the deleterious effects of loneliness.
It’s been nearly a year since our last in-depth analysis of people’s experiences making meaningful connections with others (or not) on social communication services and platforms. So, today’s report updates those findings with four additional waves of data from the Neely Social Media Index survey that allow us to see whether and how experiencing meaningful connections on these services may have changed over the past 15 months.
Meaningful Connections Across Online Communication Platforms
In the graph below, I plot the percentage of US adults reporting a meaningful connection with others on any of the platforms that they indicated using in the previous 28 days at each time point. About 60% of US adults report meaningfully connecting with others on at least one of the platforms they use. This number held steady across the 5 waves, never shifting more than the margin of error.
The overall stability here is somewhat surprising as a number of social platforms have increasingly been moving towards recommending content from accounts that users do not follow (or are not “friends” with) and towards integrating artificially intelligent chatbots to communicate with users. Though, it may be too early to observe whether the influx of these AI chatbots on these social platforms will affect people’s ability to connect meaningfully with others.
To try to understand the meaningful connection experiences reported by users, I turned to the ~50,000 words that they wrote in response to the follow-up question asked of all people who reported such an experience. Some of the most common themes included:
- People keeping in touch with their families, especially grandparents
- Seeing people who are sick and cannot have in-person visitors
- Sending and receiving supportive messages, like birthday and well wishes
- Celebrating life events, like new children, homes, and jobs
- Being able to stay in touch with friends who live far away
- Sharing memes you know certain people will like with them
- Sharing and viewing pictures and videos of people that you cannot see often
- Shared experiences laughing and having fun playing video games
- Receiving invitations to community events and protests, particularly around human rights
These topics are pretty consistent across waves, too. The one exception to the consistency is that the specific details of holidays and world events vary across waves. For example, in the 4th wave of data collection, respondents were much more likely to mention Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years than they were in any other wave. This makes sense, as that wave was collected between November and February, or the months within which those holidays fall.
In summary, the overall rate of experiencing meaningful connections on any social platform has been stable over the past 15 months. Yet, any time data across many subgroups are aggregated, there is always the risk of Simpson’s Paradox -- whereby actual differences or trends in subgroups cancel each other out creating the appearance that there is no change. To combat this risk, I disaggregate the data and compare these experiences across demographic subgroups, and across specific platforms, in the next two sections.
Do meaningful connections on social platforms differ by demographic and social identities?
Given that different types of people from different backgrounds tend to use technology differently, and for different reasons, some people may be more likely to report meaningful connections online than other people. In our analysis from one year ago, we saw that more educated people, older people, White, non-Hispanic people, and women all reported higher rates of meaningful connections online.
In the table below, I present each demographic category in the rows, the survey waves in the center columns, and the overall change from our first to our fifth waves over 15 months in the light-gray shaded columns to the right. To highlight changes, I color-coded cells in aqua if they increased and red if they decreased since the previous wave by an amount larger than the weighted margin of errors in the relevant survey waves. These color codings are also paired with up and down arrows to emphasize the direction of change.
First, let’s compare each subgroup within each demographic variable. Overall, we see the same tendencies as we found in our analysis from a year ago. Specifically, women, White-non Hispanic people, older people, more educated people, and wealthier people are all more likely to report recent meaningful connections across social platforms.
Next, let’s examine changes over time. The gaps between some of the subgroups within each of these demographic groups expanded. White, non-Hispanic people became somewhat more likely to report meaningful connections while Black and Asian, non-Hispanic people became somewhat less likely to report meaningful connections. Younger people became somewhat less likely to report meaningful connections while older people became significantly more likely to report meaningful connections. The two largest gaps in these experiences in our initial analysis actually became even larger over the subsequent year. Specifically, less educated people became significantly less likely to report meaningful connections online (-12.1%) while more educated people became significantly more likely to report meaningful connections online (+4.4%). These significant diverging trends led to the gap between the least and most educated groups expanding from 27.8% to 34.2%. Similarly, the lowest income users became somewhat less likely to report meaningful connections online (-2.5%) while the highest income users became somewhat more likely to report meaningful connections online (+3.5%).
The consistency of some groups tending to be more or less likely to report experiencing meaningful connections online reinforces the finding that different types of people use these social platforms for different reasons. The increasing gap between some of these subgroups is curious. It could be that some of the new features related to artificial intelligence or to updated user interfaces may make it harder for less educated and less wealthy people, who might have lower levels of digital literacy, to connect with people online. It could also be that these different groups of people shifted further in their motivations for using these online services. Perhaps younger and less educated people are shifting more towards using these platforms to follow creators and influencers who they may not have personal relationships with, but enjoy the content that they create even in the absence of a personal connection. These growing differences could also reflect further segregation in the particular services used by different demographic subgroups, and some platforms may be more vs. less conducive to producing meaningful connections online.
Are some services more (or less) likely to foster meaningful connections between users?
Next, we turn to whether users are more likely to experience meaningful connections on some services relative to other services, and whether that has changed over the last 15 months. Initially, we found that the services that were more focused on directed communication to a specific person or a defined group of people also tended to have the highest rates of users reporting recent meaningful connections with others. We find the same result today; Facetime, text messaging, and WhatsApp all fall within the top cluster of platforms where meaningful connections with others are the most common.
If we look at change over time, we see that two of these direct messaging-oriented services -- Facetime and text messaging -- both exhibited significant increases in the rate of their users reporting these meaningful connections over the past 15 months. WhatsApp also exhibited a numerical increase in this rate, but the change was within the margin of error and thus not statistically significant. Snapchat and LinkedIn also exhibited significant increases in the rate at which their users report experiencing meaningful connections with others. On the other end of the distribution, we see non-significant decreases of at least 1% in the rate at which Nextdoor, X (Twitter), and Reddit users report meaningful connections.
In the bar chart below, I show the year ago and the current percentages of users of each of the services reporting a meaningful connection with others in the previous 28 days. The underlying data are the same as in the above table, but the platform differences may be easier to see in this format than in the above table.
In Summary
So, we return to our original question: Are people’s meaningful connections with others online increasing or decreasing? The answer, not surprisingly, is that it’s complicated. Simply looking at the percentage of people reporting a meaningful connection with others on any social platform, we see that roughly 6 in 10 US adults reported one of these experiences across all five time points.
If we split the data by social and demographic identities, we see more variability. In particular, we see that older and more educated people have become more likely to report meaningful connections online over time, and the least educated US adults have become less likely to report meaningful connections with others over time. We also see that the gap in these reported experiences is expanding for some demographic variables. Specifically, White, non-Hispanic people, the most educated people, and the wealthiest people are now even more likely to report meaningful connections online than are Black, non-Hispanic people, the least educated people, and the lowest income people.
When we split the data by social platform, we see that the direct messaging-focused platforms, like Facetime, text messaging, and WhatsApp, tend to exhibit the highest rates of users reporting recent meaningful connections with others. On the other hand, platforms built for purposes of connecting people to content, rather than other people, like Pinterest and YouTube, tend to have the lowest rates of meaningful connections between users.
Zooming out a bit across the four top-level experience questions we’ve examined in the last 4 posts, we see that both positive experiences we ask users about (learning something useful / important, and making meaningful connections with others) have generally tended towards platform-specific increases. In contrast, we see that both negative experiences (personally- and socially-focused ones) we ask users about have generally trended towards platform-specific decreases. These trends make intuitive sense; users of many social platforms are having fewer negative experiences and more positive experiences.