Quitting Facebook before the 2020 election helped mood a little, and Instagram's gain missed the study's own bar

Sometime between August 31 and September 12, 2020, a box appeared at the top of some Facebook and Instagram news feeds. It asked a plain question: how much would you need to be paid to switch this account off for one week, or for six? Anyone who said $25 a week or less was handed to a survey firm, and Meta began locking accounts on September 23.

Most people scrolled right past it. Of 10.6 million Facebook users invited, 673,388 clicked, and 19,857 ended up in the main analysis. The result of that experiment landed in the November 2026 issue of the journal American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, and a Reddit post on r/science this week described it as a substantial improvement in happiness, depression and anxiety. The paper's own numbers are more modest.

How small is 0.06?

The authors, led by Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow with 25 co-authors, give their own yardsticks. A meta-analysis of 419 randomized trials of psychological interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness found an average gain of 0.27 standard deviations. Set against that, the Facebook result is about 22 percent as large, and the Instagram result about 15 percent.

There is a flip side, and it is the more interesting one. The control groups felt 0.07 to 0.09 standard deviations worse at the end of the campaign than they did at baseline or in December. By the authors' arithmetic, quitting erased more than half of that election-season dip. The campaign season itself dragged mood down, and the feed appears to have carried part of that weight.

Facebook held up. Instagram wobbled

The Facebook result clears p<0.01 on its own and after the authors adjust for the many political outcomes tested in a companion paper. The Instagram result tells a different story. On its own it reaches p=0.016. After the same adjustment it slips to p=0.14, which misses the p=0.05 threshold the team set in advance.

Both papers also report subgroups: the Facebook gain looks larger for people over 35, and the Instagram gain for women aged 18 to 24. Those cuts were not pre-registered, so they are leads, not findings. The Instagram result is the one the data support least firmly.

One more oddity. The time people stopped spending on Instagram mostly went to other phone apps, according to passive tracking, not to offline activities. The mood gain showed up anyway, so the usual story about people swapping scrolling for walks does not explain it here.

Who said yes to $150

The treatment group was offered $150 to stay off for six weeks, and controls were offered $25 to stay off for one. Everyone therefore knew they were in a deactivation study, which was the point: it cut down on one kind of bias. The authors still say they cannot fully rule out that people's answers were shaped by knowing they were being watched.

The bigger caution is who took part. Fewer than one percent of invited users finished the experiment, and the sample leaned more liberal and more civically engaged than Facebook and Instagram users overall. The team weights for traits it can see, but not for traits it cannot. Mood came from three survey questions about how often people felt happy, depressed or anxious in the past four weeks, tucked inside a larger political survey.

The scale is still unusual. The authors count 31,282 participants across the two experiments, against a prior maximum of 1,955 in earlier randomized abstention studies, and a longest earlier abstention of four weeks. Allcott and Gentzkow ran a smaller version of the idea ahead of the 2018 midterms, published in the American Economic Review in 2020.

None of this comes from an outside critic. Everything above rests on one paper and the authors' own list of limitations, and no independent replication has surfaced. That list includes a point that matters for anyone planning their own digital detox: about six percent of the Facebook content people viewed in 2020 was political, and both platforms have since cut political content in the feed. Run the same experiment in a quieter year, the authors say, and the answer could be different.