We use Italian data from the Multipurpose Household Survey to explore how participation in social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook and Twitter affects the most economically relevant aspect of social capital, trust. We account for measures of trust in strangers (often referred to as social trust), trust in neighbours (particularized trust) and trust in the police (institutional trust).
There is growing evidence that face-to-face interaction is declining in many countries, exacerbating the phenomenon of social isolation. On the other hand, social interaction through online networking sites is steeply rising.
Social media have been credited with the potential of reinvigorating trust by offering new opportunities for social and political participation. This view has been recently challenged by the rising phenomenon of online incivility, which has made the environment of social networking sites hostile to many users. We conduct a novel experiment in a Facebook setting to study how the effect of social media on trust varies depending on the civility or incivility of online interaction.
We test the relationship between the use of social networking sites (SNS) and a proxy of utility, i.e. subjective well-being (SWB), using instrumental variables. Additionally, we disentangle the indirect effects of SNS on well-being mediated by face-to-face interactions and social trust using a structural equation model. Results suggest that the use of SNS hampers people’s well-being directly and indirectly, through its negative effects on social trust. However, the use of SNS also has a positive impact on well-being because it increases the probability of face-to-face interactions.
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