lThe arrest and then indictment of Pavel Durov for the use of his Telegram platform by criminal organisations has revived debates about the dangers of social media, particularly for the mental health of young people. While some are crying foul over the attacks on freedom of expression, others are questioning the effectiveness of this arrest. Can we imagine managing the public health crisis linked to tobacco by arresting the owners of tobacco companies, without regulating the price and allowing minor users to access cigarettes? This is a fundamental principle of public economics: we must regulate and tax goods and services that generate negative externalities.
Of course, social media is not tobacco. In particular, tobacco use, as we know, generates negative externalities – that is, negative impacts on those who choose not to use tobacco – due in particular to the danger of secondary exposure to smoke. But tobacco, particularly among young people, generates another externality, called “network externality”: the more others smoke, the more interested I am in smoking. For example, smoking in the bathroom (or in the office version, sharing a cigarette break).
And this is how social media is much more like tobacco than one might imagine. Social media consumption, like cigarette consumption, is eminently social. It generates network externalities: the more users a platform has, the more interest others have in joining it, to find their friends, for example. And these externalities can be negative for those who are not present: fear of missing something (an evening or an important event), fear of being excluded or of being looked down upon. This is what a study carried out by four economists with more than 1,000 American students (“When product markets become collective traps: the case of social media”, Leonardo Bursztyn, Benjain Handel, Rafael Jiménez and Christopher Roth, shows. working document No. 31771, National Directorate of Economic Research, 2023-2024).
Collective responsibility
The guinea pigs were offered to deactivate their Instagram or TikTok account under two possible scenarios: either no other users deactivate their account, or all others deactivate theirs as well. The results are clear. If no other users deactivate, no participant wants to deactivate their account. On the other hand, many of them would like to delete their own use of the social network if others did the same. In particular, the majority of students (60%) would like to delete their TikTok account in the event that all students did the same (46% in the case of Instagram). They would even be willing to pay (on average $24, or €21.70) to delete their TikTok account, provided that everyone else does so.
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