It’s not every day that causal evidence is quoted in the headlines. Incidentally, we had a similar (unpublished) study on Instagram looking at the effects of “Instagram perfect” on users’ prosocial behavior (also through social comparison as the mechanism), with somewhat parallel results.
So, I am not surprised at all by this finding:
To the company’s disappointment, “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,” internal documents said.