Accepting Facebook friend requests may lengthen users' lives, study says

If you accept all your Facebook friend requests, you’re probably expected to live longer.

Scientists who studied Facebook activity for more than a decade suggest that people who have strong social media networks and receive multiple friend requests are less likely to die.

The study published in the National Academy of Science, led by Northeastern University professor Williams Hobb and University of California, San Diego, professor James Fowler, showed that there are links between people’s health and their social media accounts, whether in person or online.

“We find that Facebook users who accept more friendships have a lower risk of mortality, but there is no relationship for those who initiate more friendships,” the authors wrote. “Mortality risk is lowest for those with high levels of offline social interaction and moderate levels of online social interaction.”

 Hobbs believes people who have mod­erate inter­ac­tions on Facebooks are more likely to remain friends with them in person, he said in a Northeastern newsletter.

In their study, Hobbs and Fowler took data over six months from 12 million California-based Facebook users in 2011 and compared them to records from the California Department of Public Health from 2012 to 2013 to check how many people died within those years. Those Facebook users, of all genders and ages, were born between 1945 and 1989.

The scientists concluded that there was no link between people’s health and the Facebook requests they have sent and those who accepted them.

“You would think that the asso­ci­a­tion would go both ways,” Hobb said in the newsletter. “That was a dis­ap­pointing finding because it sug­gests that telling people to go out and make more friends might not improve their health.”