About a third of the people you interact with on social media, statistically speaking, are people you’ve never shaken hands with. New Oregon State University research puts a number on it: 35% of the contacts in the average adult’s social media network are strangers, people they’ve never met face-to-face. And per the study, those are exactly the connections tied to more loneliness — not the childhood best friend you also follow on Instagram, not your cousin’s baby photos on Facebook, but the accounts that exist only as a profile picture and a comment thread.
The Study Behind the Number
The research, led by Brian Primack, a professor in Oregon State University’s College of Health, surveyed more than 1,500 U.S. adults ages 30 to 70 during the summer of 2023. Participants reported how they used ten major platforms — Facebook, X, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Pinterest and WhatsApp — and researchers cross-referenced that usage against validated measures of loneliness. The findings, published in Public Health Reports, the official journal of the U.S. Public Health Service and funded by the National Institutes of Health, split social contacts into two groups: people participants had met in person, and people they hadn’t.
Strangers Move the Needle. Real Friends Don’t — Either Way.
Here’s the split that matters. According to the Oregon State research, interacting online with contacts participants had never met in person was associated with increased loneliness. Interacting with people they actually knew — friends, family, coworkers they also happened to follow online — showed no significant association with loneliness at all, in either direction. Not less lonely. Not more. Essentially neutral.
That’s a more precise finding than the usual “social media makes you lonely” headline allows for. The problem isn’t the platform. It’s who’s on the other end of it. A comment from your sister lands as a comment from your sister, whether it happens over text or in an Instagram thread. A comment from someone you’ve never met carries none of that grounding — no shared history, no way to calibrate whether the connection is real.
Notably, the research doesn’t let real-life friendships off the hook by claiming online contact deepens them, either. Keeping up with people you already know didn’t measurably reduce loneliness — it just didn’t add to it. The people doing the actual work of making you feel less alone, in other words, are the ones you’d call on the phone or sit across a table from regardless of whether a platform existed at all.
“Examine Critically”
Primack put it directly: “People experiencing loneliness may wish to examine critically their interactions with strangers on social media and to prioritize in-person connections over social media ones, even when those social media connections are considered close,” he said in connection with the study’s release.
Co-author Jessica Gorman pointed to part of the mechanism behind the pattern. “We know that social media interactions can result in idealization of other people’s friendships with each other, which can exacerbate the effects of social comparison,” she noted. Following a stranger’s curated feed hands you their highlight reel with none of the context — you’re measuring your actual life against their edited one, and the comparison has nowhere real to land because there’s no relationship underneath it.
Why the Stakes Are Higher Than a Bad Mood
Loneliness isn’t just an unpleasant feeling to shrug off — it’s a documented health risk. People who report chronic loneliness are more than twice as likely to develop depression, according to the U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on social connection, and face a 29% higher risk of heart disease, a 32% higher risk of stroke, a 50% higher risk of dementia in older adults, and a more than 60% higher risk of premature death.
Set against numbers like that, the Oregon State findings reframe a familiar debate. The question was never really “social media: good or bad.” It’s who you’re actually connecting with when you’re on it, and whether that connection can hold any real weight. With roughly 1 in 3 contacts across major platforms belonging to people users have never met, that’s not a niche edge case — it’s a substantial share of the average feed, quietly doing more harm than good.
The fix implied by the data isn’t a digital detox. It’s an audit. If more than a third of your online interactions are with people who wouldn’t recognize you at a coffee shop, the loneliness those interactions are producing isn’t a mystery — it’s the math working exactly the way this research describes. The friendships that were already real before they went online are still doing the job friendships are supposed to do. It’s the ones that never left the feed that are quietly costing you.
