Browsing by Author "Eyzaguirre Ercilla, Alejo"

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    Mayday, mayday!: Social Media Down
    (2022) Eyzaguirre Ercilla, Alejo; Lafortune, Jeanne; Celhay, Pablo; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Instituto de Economía
    What would happen if social media platforms turned off? This article sheds light on the short-term effects of a forced exogenous shutdown of social media without prior notice. If social media is addictive, dependent individuals should first suffer mood disorders and behavior changes as withdrawal symptoms but then benefit from its forced avoidance. Using a difference-in-differences and an event studies strategy, I exploit the random timing of the Meta outages and differences in social media penetration between geographic units or cohorts to identify the causal effects. I find that in Chile, during an outage day, geographical areas with eight percentage points more social media penetration experience 16% fewer mental health-related emergency room admissions. There is no apparent effect on car accidents when comparing geographical units, but more exposed cohorts experience fewer car accidents during prolonged outages. Last, in the U.S., there is no effect on Google searches for some plausible withdrawal symptoms. Overall, I am unable to find evidence of negative impacts of shortages; if anything, these seem to be positive.