Over the last few years, the use of social media has become an increasingly popular leisure activity in many countries across the world (Kuss & Griffiths, 2011). Individuals visit social media sites to engage in many different types of entertainment and social activity including playing games, socializing, passing time, communicating, and posting pictures (Allen, Ryan, Gray, Mclnerney, & Waters, 2014; Ryan, Chester, Reece, & Xenos, 2014). Although this has quickly become a normal modern phenomenon (boyd & Ellison, 2007), concerns have been raised regarding the potential addictive use of social media (e.g., Andreassen, 2015, Griffiths, Kuss, & Demetrovics, 2014). Such excessive and compulsive use has been explained by general addiction models (Griffiths, 2005) and defined accordingly as “being overly concerned about social media, driven by an uncontrollable motivation to log on to or use social media, and devoting so much time and effort to social media that it impairs other important life areas” (Andreassen & Pallesen, 2014, p. 4054).

۱٫۱٫ Addictive use of social media

The term ‘Internet addiction’ has been criticized for being too unspecific in terms of content. Consequently, some scholars have suggested content-related ‘addiction subtypes’ such as ‘cybersexual addiction’, ‘social media addiction’, ‘net compulsions’ (e.g., stock trading, gambling, shopping), ‘information overload’, and ‘computer addiction’ (e.g., games, programming) (Young, 1999, 2015). When drawing the line between addictive and non-addictive (e.g., excessive, enthusiastic) behaviors, scholars use specific addiction criteria (Griffiths, 2005). Accordingly, addictive social media use should thus be manifested by being preoccupied by social media (salience), using social media in order to reduce negative feelings (mood modification), gradually using social media more and more in order to get the same pleasure from it (tolerance/craving), suffering distress if prohibited from using social media (withdrawal), sacrificing other obligations and/ or causing harm to other important life areas because of the social media use (conflict/functional impairment), and desiring or attempting to control the use of social media without success (relapse/loss of control). Consequently, as problematic social media use may represent a specific form of ‘Internet addiction’, the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale was specifically developed in order to assess this behavior using the aforementioned addiction criteria (Andreassen, Torsheim, Brunborg, & Pallesen, 2012). Although the scale has demonstrated reliable and valid psychometric properties across several studies (e.g., Andreassen et al., 2012, 2013; Phanasathit, Manwong, Hanprathet, Khumsri, & Yingyeun, 2015; Wang, Ho, Chan, & Tse, 2015), a generic instrument capturing the totality of all social network sites, as opposed to measuring addictive use of one specific social network site only (i.e., Facebook), has been called for (Griffiths et al., 2014).