Nearly 45% of adults who are active on social media say they regret how much they used it when they were younger, according to a Kaspersky survey of 1,240 working professionals across six Asia-Pacific countries (Australia, India, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam). On the other side, Security.org’s survey of 1,012 US adults found that roughly 14% of those who deleted Facebook reported no change in happiness afterward, 86% described themselves as happier, and 0% said they were less happy. That survey never asks “do you regret deleting?”, so the true deletion-regret rate it implies is closer to zero than to 14% — the ~14% is the satisfaction-neutral group, a conservative ceiling rather than a measured regret rate. The implied ratio favors deletion, but the comparison is imprecise: one survey measures retrospective volume regret among current users, the other measures post-deletion mood among a self-selected group of quitters.
The strongest experimental evidence comes from Hunt, Marx, Lipson, and Young (2018) at the University of Pennsylvania. In a randomized controlled trial, 143 undergraduates were assigned to either limit Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat to 10 minutes per platform per day or use social media as usual for three weeks. The limited-use group showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression compared to controls over the three weeks. This is one of the few studies establishing a causal (not merely correlational) link between social media reduction and improved well-being.
The main weakness in framing this as a clean action-vs-inaction pair is that “deleting social media” is rarely a permanent, total act. Many deleters migrate to other platforms, reactivate after a few months, or simply reduce usage without full deletion. The Security.org survey focused exclusively on Facebook, not all social media. The Kaspersky figure applies to Asia-Pacific professionals, not a globally representative sample. What the data does suggest, directionally, is that sustained heavy use generates more stated regret than leaving does — a finding corroborated by Hunt et al.’s experimental evidence that reduction causes genuine well-being improvement.