In The Relations Among Social Media Addiction, Self-Esteem, and Life Satisfaction in University Students, Nazir Hawi and Maya Samaha aim to understand “the relationships between the addictive use of social media, self esteem, and satisfaction with life.”  

Hawi and Samaha suggest that as of January 2016, the use of social media engaged close to one-third of the world’s population. Statistics have shown an average annual increase of 10% in total number of users. To further understand the escalating phenomenon and its impact on users’ lives, a generic questionnaire, the Social Media Addiction Questionnaire (SMAQ) was used from the Facebook Intrusion Questionnaire. Results showed that “addictive use of social media had a negative association with self-esteem, and the latter had a positive association with satisfaction with life.” 

Interestingly, the main hypotheses prior to their methods revolved around the idea that there were no gender differences between social media addiction and satisfaction of life or self-esteem. Throughout generations, women have always been compared by their physical attributes rather than their merit or internal well-being. With social media taking this to a whole new extreme, women are forced to meet even higher expectations; people can now zoom in on every feature and flaw of their lives and especially bodies. Overall, the only hypothesis that was supported was that self-esteem is the main mediator of the effects of social media addiction of satisfaction with life. 

Hawi and Samaha go further in defining social media addiction as a compulsive social media site that manifests itself in behavioral addiction symptoms, such as salience, tolerance, conflict, withdrawal, relapse, and mood modification (Griffiths, 2005). 

It is jarring to see that this definition of social media addiction started several years before Instagram was released in 2010 and Snapchat was created in 2011. I am curious to see if the annual increase of 10% became less linear and more exponential after these platforms were designed and manufactured to promote addictive behavior, rather than the latter of natural behavioral attachment from earlier media.