Today 15% of men have no close friends compared to 3% in the 90s
Elon Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion in October, is now wondering if people should use social media less.
After a Twitter user wrote that “anti-social tendencies make people lonelier,” Musk responded, “Maybe we should spend less time on social media…?”
The user Musk replied to cited a 2021 study by the Center for American Life Research, which showed that the number of friends people have dropped dramatically over the past three decades. Today, 15% of men do not have close friends compared to 3% in the 90s. For women, the results are 10% and 2%, respectively.
Musk himself is an active Twitter user. He wrote this reply just after 1:00 a.m. local time on Thursday, at 1:30 a.m. he wrote another comment, and returned to Twitter around 9 a.m.
An analysis in November found that Elon Musk tweeted an average of once per hour in the three weeks following the Twitter purchase. Replies to other users accounted for the largest share of his Twitter activity, both before and after the purchase.
Last year, Musk said he wanted to kick his “terrible habit of checking his phone right away” in the morning.
“I [need] to train and be in better shape. So, I’m going to switch from immediately looking at my phone as soon as I wake up to exercising for at least 20 minutes, after which I’ll already grab my smartphone.
