Understanding Digital Well-being in Social Media Use: App-Specific Use, Goal Pursuit, and Platform Designs

Abstract

Social media platforms are now deeply embedded in everyday life, shaping how people communicate, seek information, and experience social connection. Over the past two decades, a large and rapidly growing body of research has examined the relationship between social media use and users’ health and well-being. Findings from the digital well-being literature have remained mixed, documenting both positive and negative associations between social media use and well-being. These mixed findings are partly attributable to the complexity and heterogeneity of social media use, which involves highly content- and context-dependent behaviors, and are further compounded by persistent limitations in access to behavioral data from online platforms. This dissertation contributes to the literature on social media use and well-being through three correlated and complementary perspectives. The first chapter reviews existing research on social media and well-being, outlines key conceptual and methodological challenges in the field, and introduces the three following empirical chapters, explaining how they are positioned within the existing evidence and how they contribute to the field. The second chapter introduces a novel approach to measuring objective social media use using user-donated screenshots and examines how app-specific usage patterns relate to daily well-being outcomes. The third chapter shifts from exposure-based measures to psychological processes of goal pursuit, examining how goal awareness and goal strength shape momentary social media experiences and well-being, and incorporating TikTok data donation packages to advance objective measurement. The fourth chapter shifts attention to the platform level, using Large Language Model (LLM)–assisted content analysis to examine how major social media companies articulate and signal compliance with digital well-being practices, providing empirical evidence relevant to policy and regulatory discussions. Together, these studies offer a multi-dimensional account of how social media use, user psychology, and platform design jointly shape well-being in digital environments. The second chapter investigates the association between app-specific social media use and daily well-being among adolescents using app specific use data extracted from screenshots. Drawing on a two-week ecological momentary assessment (EMA) on social media use and well-being, combined with user-donated screenshots from 374 Swiss adolescents (mean age = 15.71; 61% female), the study introduces “Appnomes,” a set of app-level metrics capturing screen time, number of activations, and notifications across platforms. These behavioral indicators were linked to daily measures of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being using multilevel models. Overall, results revealed small, mixed, or null associations between app-specific use and well-being. While certain associations emerged, such as longer TikTok use predicting lower same-day eudaimonic well-being but higher next-day positive emotions, Snapchat screen time predicting lower relaxation, competence, and positive affect, and WhatsApp activations predicting greater feelings of connection. Collectively, these results challenge the moral panic on the detrimental impact of social media use on teens well-being and underscore the limitations of exposure-based models that ignore contextual and psychological factors. The third chapter shifts focus from behavioral exposure to underlying psychological processes, examining how goal awareness, defined as awareness of one’s goal for social media use, and goal strength, the degree to which an individual is motivated to pursue that goal, shape momentary user experiences and well-being. Using a 7-day EMA design with 266 U.S. adults (six surveys per day; 71.3% response rate), the study integrates self-reported goals for social media use and well-being outcomes, screentime screenshots, and user-donated TikTok behavioral data. Within individuals, higher goal awareness and goal strength were associated with more positive experiences and better well-being, respectively, particularly when social media use served goals such as coping, entertainment, passing time, or habitual use. TikTok data showed little behavioral variation by goal awareness and goal strength, except that users with higher goal awareness skipped videos faster. Findings highlight goal awareness as a key process shaping momentary social media use experiences, while also underscore the need to better capture behavioral signals of intentional social media use. The fourth chapter extends the analysis from users to platforms, examining social media platforms’ claims to promote digital well-being practices. Digital media platforms increasingly face pressure from the public and legislators worldwide to mitigate harm to user well-being and promote healthier digital environments. Platforms appear to be paying greater attention to digital well-being proclaiming actions being taken by them to mitigate the harm. This study provides arguably the first large-scale analysis of digital well-being related-practices claimed by platforms using LLM-assisted content analysis of 13,497 company announcements published by seven major platforms (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, X/Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat) from each platform’s first post through May 15, 2025. Our analysis identified 5,685 distinct digital well-being practices, showing a steady increase in platform-reported efforts since 2019, with a notable surge following the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union. Across the four identified mechanisms of digital well-being practices, more than 80 percent of practices fall within content-based governance and user-initiated controls, with far fewer addressing default safety features or personalized algorithmic curation. Only a small share of announcements includes user-level impact evaluation, leaving the implementation status and actual effects of these practices largely unknown. The study indicates that platforms appear responsive to public and legislative pressures, but the actions they highlight tend to emphasize visible, content-focused measures rather than deeper changes to underlying algorithmic operations. Taken together, this dissertation highlights the complexity of the relationship between social media use and well-being. It addresses this complexity through two complementary structural approaches: examining the psychological processes underlying social media use to conceptualize use as goal pursuit processes and extending the scope of digital well-being to the platform level by analyzing platform design practices. The insights from this dissertation are particularly relevant for emerging AI-mediated tools, where both user psychology and platform design choices play central roles in shaping user experiences and well-being. Finally, this dissertation advances methodological approaches by integrating objective social media data, collected through screenshots and platform data donation packages, with self-reported measures to enable more rigorous study of digital well-being.