Lockdown Loneliness and Social Media

Restrictions on social activities have been an integral part of many societies’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. There is little doubt that such ‘lockdowns’ have helped to prevent the spread of the disease, and, consequently, have saved lives.

However, these responses have brought their own problematic issues that need to be recognised. One of these issues is loneliness, which, it is claimed, is affecting more and more people during lockdown¹. Social media companies were quick to suggest that their technology could offer important help in this area, and this formed a core part of advertising campaigns for these companies, from the start of the pandemic². However, the research suggests that the impact of social media on lockdown loneliness is complex, and there are times when social media use will, and will not, help ease this problem.

It is hard to know precisely how many people feel lonely at any one time, and estimates of loneliness prior to the lockdowns vary dramatically. Accounts published pre-COVID in academic journals generally put the figure of people experiencing loneliness at about 10% of the population³, but this does vary from report to report, and from age group to age group⁴. Especially vulnerable pre-COVID, were the elderly, with anything between 30% and 100% of this group being suggested as experiencing loneliness⁴.

In contrast, a survey conducted during COVID⁵ noted that around 25% of the whole population felt lonely in any given two-week period of lockdown. This figure rose to over a third of those between 18 and 34 years old – suggesting younger people are being differentially affected. The greater impact of lockdown on younger individuals was also seen in a longitudinal study, which demonstrated that being younger, a woman, poorer, and a student, were all risk factors for feeling lonely during lockdown⁶. The latter study also suggested that while, overall, loneliness was not rising during lockdown, it was increasing for these risk groups.

It is against this background that the role of social media in potentially alleviating lockdown loneliness can be considered. Not just because social media is such a ubiquitous presence in most people’s lives, but also because some of the very groups who seem to be becoming more lonely over lockdown are also the very groups who tend to use social media most often — the young, and, to some extent, women.

Does this fact suggest that social media does not work in reducing lockdown loneliness? That question is difficult to answer, as we do not know what would have happened if those groups had not had access to social media. However, we do know some of the predictors of when social media will help, and when it will not, and we know the relationships between these vulnerable groups and these predictors.

There seems to be good evidence that younger people have used social media more during the lockdown periods than before, with one study suggesting up to 75% of adolescents report using social media much more than before⁷. According to one set of researchers, this should be good news for coping with lockdown⁸ — a study from a group of researchers associated with Oxford University suggested that digital technology could be used to manage lockdown loneliness. This resonates with the advertising campaign from Facebook², but it might be noted that this study was connected to a company involved in the development of such digital technology. Other research paints a rather more complicated picture of the effects of social media on lockdown loneliness. It seems that social media use in lockdown is associated with two factors — anxiety and loneliness^7,9. These two psychological factors drive using social media in quite different ways, with quite different results.

Anxious people use social media to seek information about how to deal with the pandemic, and this seems to make them happier⁷. At least, up to a point. Two factors place a limit on the increase of their happiness and sometimes can reverse this trend. The first factor represents a curious cycle. Anxious people use the internet to cope with their uncertainties and worries. Their searches initially make them happy, presumably by relieving some of their anxiety⁷. This reinforcement may well lead to increased use of social media. However, this increased social media use has the unfortunate result of increasing their anxiety⁹. Secondly, if too much information is accessed as a result of social media use, often involving getting conflicting information, then, far from reducing anxiety, this can increase the problem¹⁰. I have discussed such negative consequences of informational overload from digital communication platforms, previously¹¹.

In contrast to the anxious, people who are lonely tend to use social media during COVID to make contact with their friends and family⁷. Research suggests that the social isolation felt by these individuals during lockdown most likely strengthens their view of their own loneliness, driving them to find contact in the only ways available to them, such as becoming members of digital communities⁹. However, this form of social contact does not make them any happier. This negative finding should not be surprising, as it has been previously established that social media does not actually reduce loneliness, but tends to increase such feelings¹².

This problem may be especially pronounced for the young, and for women; groups who both tend (and this is only an average) to engage in social comparisons to a large degree. Findings from studies have shown that, while social media browsing lowers loneliness, posting and interacting tend to increase it¹³. This effect is impacted by the degree to which social comparisons are made, in that social media only helps for those who do not engage in such comparisons — which may rule it out as useful for the very people who are feeling greater loneliness (the young, and women), as these people tend to make social comparisons the most.

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Thus, we have a situation where social media looks like something that should help with loneliness during lockdown and is touted, admittedly by social media companies, as something that can help. However, the evidence suggests that this help may be limited. Using the informational resources, sparingly and wisely, may help with anxiety, but there is no compelling evidence that it will impact loneliness and no compelling evidence that this form of technology is any real substitute for other forms of social contact (the telephone, for example). Until face-to-face social contact is safe, we may well need to think of other ways than social media of providing support for the lonely during lockdown.