How does social media use impact subjective well-being? Examining the suppressing role of Internet addiction and the moderating effect of digital skills

INTRODUCTION: Previous studies have explored the impact of social media use on people’s subjective well-being, but there is a lack of discussion on the relationship between social media use, Internet addiction, and subjective well-being, and the research on the influence of digital skills on this relationship is not sufficient. This paper aims to fill these gaps. Based on the flow theory, this paper takes Chinese residents as the research object and uses CGSS 2017 data to analyze the impact of social media use on people’s subjective well-being. METHODS: Our study used multiple linear regression models for analysis. To test the hypotheses and the moderated mediation model, we adopted PROCESS models with 5000 bias-corrected bootstrap samples and 95% confidence intervals. All analyses were conducted using SPSS 25.0. RESULTS: The empirical analysis shows that social media use has a positive direct effect on subjective well-being, and Internet addiction plays a suppressing role in the relationship between social media use and subjective well-being. In addition, we found that digital skills moderated the positive effect of social media use on Internet addiction and the indirect effect of social media use on subjective well-being through Internet addiction. DISCUSSION: The conclusion of this paper supports our previous hypothesis. Besides, the theoretical contribution, practical significance, and limitations of this study are discussed based on the results of previous studies.