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Hopelab & Well Being Trust 17 Key Finding 8 This survey did not find a statistically significant association between depressive symptoms and whether respondents reported engaging in more "active" or "passive" behaviors on social media. 8 Frison, E. and Eggermont, S. (2015). "Toward an integrated and differential approach to the relationships between loneliness, different types of Facebook use, and adolescents' depressed mood." Communication Re- search:0093650215617506; Frison, E. and Eggermont, S. (2016). "Exploring the relationships between different types of Facebook use, perceived online social support, and adolescents' depressed mood." Social Science Computer Review 34 (2):153-171. • Some previous research has suggested that "passive" social media use (e.g., scrolling through people's feeds without posting or commenting) may be correlated with increased depression while "active" use (liking, commenting, and posting) may be correlated with lower levels of depression. 8 Therefore this survey explored whether young people with moderate to severe depressive symptoms report engaging in these and other common social-media actions at a different frequency than their peers. • In this sample, respondents with moderate to severe depressive symptoms, as indicated by PHQ-8 scores, were no less likely than those with no depressive symptoms to say they post content on social media on a daily basis (29% say they do so daily, compared to 32% of those with no depression), comment on other people's posts (16% vs. 18% "often" do so), send private messages to people (29% vs. 28% do so "often"), create and share original content (20% vs. 18% "often"), or share content created by others (18% vs. 13% of non-depressed youth say they "often" do so). • The only surveyed action that young people with moderate to severe depressive symptoms report doing with a different frequency than their non-depressed peers is "like" other people's posts, which they report doing more frequently than others do: 62% of young people with moderate to severe depressive symptoms say they often "like" others' posts, compared to 47% of non-depressed youth. • There is no difference in how often young people with moderate to severe depressive symptoms vs. those with no symptoms report passively browsing other people's feeds without liking or commenting on them (32% vs. 24% say they "often" do that). • The data presented here are for the population of 14- to 22-year-olds as whole; it is possible that more detailed future analyses may uncover relationships in specific subsets of this population, or may detect subtler patterns of use not evident in these direct comparisons. Key Findings

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