Abstract
Recent attention has focused on the tendency for social media, namely Facebook and its News Feed, to promote unfavorable social comparisons, or envy. We extend this work in a survey that looks at three main questions. First, are people who exhibit lower well-being more vulnerable to unfavorable social comparisons in social media? Second, how do Facebook and Twitter differ in their tendencies to promote unfavorable social comparisons? And third, what structural factors in each platform might explain differences? We find substantial evidence that, indeed, low well-being individuals are more vulnerable to unfavorable social comparisons in social media and that across the board, users are more prone to envy on Facebook than Twitter. Finally, we find suggestive evidence that greater references to the self on Facebook and a larger presence of public figures and organizations on Twitter help account for the difference.
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