Understanding the relationship between the use of social media and the prevalence of anxiety at the country level: a multi-country examination

Social media companies have become some of the most prominent multinational enterprises over the last few decades. In response to calls in the international business literature for a greater understanding of the externalities of multinational enterprises' activities, we employ the micro-macro level theory of purposeful group formation within society and the affordance-based framework to understand the association between the use of three popular global social media platforms (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) and the prevalence of anxiety at the country-level while accounting for heterogeneity in country institutional environments, using a 30-country, eleven-year, unbalanced panel dataset. We further explore whether informal institutional elements (i.e., national culture) are associated with the prevalence of anxiety and/or moderate the association between the use of social media and the prevalence of anxiety. Our findings indicate that the use of all three social media platforms, when considered as a percentage of the population using each platform, are negatively associated with the prevalence of anxiety in a country, with Twitter having the strongest association. We also find that the informal institutional elements have important moderating effects when considering the influence of the use of social media on the prevalence of anxiety across countries.