ABSTRACT. We inspect the relevant literature on Facebook addiction (e.g. Abbasi and Alghamdi, 2017; Błachnio et al., 2017; Brailovskaia and Margraf, 2017; Carbonell and Panova, 2017; Casale and Fioravanti, 2018; Delaney, Stein, and Gruber, 2018; Frison et al., 2018; Gul et al., 2018, Marker, Gnambs, and Appel, 2017; Monacis et al., 2017; O’Sullivan and Hussain, 2017; Schou Andreassen, Pallesen, and Griffiths, 2017; Turel, Brevers, and Bechara, 2018; Vanman, Baker, and Tobin, 2018; Young et al., 2017) and provide both quantitative evidence on trends and various in-depth empirical examples. Using data from Business Insider, Edison Research, Facebook, GlobalWebIndex, Hootsuite, Internet World Stats, KPCB, Pew Research Center, Piper Jaffray, Priceonomics, Retrevo, Statista, Techcrunch, Triton Digital, and We Are Social, we performed analyses and made estimates regarding social media usage among U.S. youth, teens’ most important social network, the fastest growing social and messaging apps worldwide, % of users of each social media site who use another social media site, % of global population using Facebook by region, % of social networking websites’s users who ever gets news on the site, % of online adults who use certain social media websites, monthly active users of selected social media networks and messaging services, % of Facebook news consumers who regularly see news on Facebook, among the users of selected sites, Facebook’s daily active users as % of monthly active users, % who use each respective site with certain frequencies, % of teen social media users/online adults who use the most relevant sites most often, and leading countries based on number of Facebook users.

Keywords: Facebook addiction; depressive symptom; adverse psychological health

How to cite: Burwell, Caryl, George Lăzăroiu, Nicholas Rothchild, and Vanessa Shackelford (2018). “Social Networking Site Use and Depressive Symptoms: Does Facebook Activity Lead to Adverse Psychological Health?”, Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations 17: 141–158.

Received 18 November 2017 • Received in revised form 22 April 2018
Accepted 26 April 2018 • Available online 30 April 2018

doi:10.22381/LPI1720188