Instagram, Snapchat Linked with Increased Alcohol Use by New College Students

Exposure to alcohol-related content on social media platforms has been linked with an increase in alcohol consumption by college students, according to new research released this week by Loyola Marymount University.

Findings were published by the journal Addictive Behaviors, with additional reports to be published by the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs and the Journal of American College Health.

In one study, 309 students allowed their Instagram usage to be tracked and newsfeeds sampled for two months as they entered college. The students completed a baseline survey and two follow-up surveys. The researchers found a correlation between consumption of alcohol-related Instagram content within the initial two-month period for students entering college and increased alcohol use at the end of the first year.

A separate study found that simply using the social media platform Snapchat was linked with an increased likelihood that students would drink more than their non-Snapchat-using peers. The Loyola Marymount researchers came away with two other findings:

• Students with “finsta” accounts—stealth or “fake” Instagram accounts that are kept private from parents and authority figures—were more likely to be heavy alcohol users by the end of the school year.
• For male students, every 30 minutes of daily Snapchat use during the transitional period at the start of the college school year translated to 1 extra drink per week by the end of the year.

“Social media applications like Instagram and Snapchat are great at creating perceptions of what is normal, and as humans we act based on what we believe others are doing,” Joe LaBrie, LMU psychology professor and lead author of the studies, said in a news release.

“The problem is that the perceptions generated by these apps are often skewed, so that behavior is based on an incomplete or exaggerated view of what is really going on around us. Instagram and Snapchat are more prone to creating risky perceptions because of their greater privacy settings and more ephemeral, disappearing content than Facebook.”