Would you pay to quit TikTok and Instagram? You’d be surprised by how many people would.

Social media poses a challenge for economists, who struggle to value it accurately.

It has been argued that social media should be included in the national accounts as part of the gross domestic product (GDP). A 2019 study estimated that Facebook alone is worth $40 to $50 per month for consumers in the United States.

However, social media platforms are free, and national accounts only measure what people pay for, regardless of their significance or the amount of time spent using them.

As the Australian Senate prepares to hold an inquiry into the impact of social media, economists at the annual conference of the Economic Society of Australia in Adelaide were presented with new findings about the value of social media, suggesting it is negative.

That’s right: the findings indicate that social media is worth less to us than the zero we pay for it, implying that we might be better off without it.

Leonardo Bursztyn of the University of Chicago presented these findings in the keynote address at the conference.

The findings are shocking because they challenge a fundamental principle of modern economics—that we value the things we use. In other words, our behavior is seen as the best indication of our preferences. The economist who developed this theory of revealed preference won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Bursztyn and his colleagues surveyed over 1,000 US university students, asking a series of questions about TikTok, Instagram, and Google Maps (more on maps later).