Dutch Ad Agency Challenges FB Users to Live For 99 Days Without Facebook; Agency Director Clarifies That Experiment Was Not Done To Slam The Social Networking Site

A Dutch advertising agency challenged users to go 99 days without Facebook in a social experiment to test if people can live happier without logging on to their social media.

The campaign called "99 Days of Freedom" by the Dutch ad agency Just came up at the time that Facebook revealed that it manipulated contents in the timeline to observe personal behavior towards the posts. Based on Facebook's study, a user tends to be happy when only positive posts come up in his timeline, and sad when presented otherwise.

Facebook conducted the user behavior study without notifying the 689,000 users that got affected of the study, and as the issue became viral, the Just team thought that it may also be helpful to study how people behave without Facebook.

"As we discussed it internally, we noted an interesting tendency: To a person, everyone had at least a 'complicated' relationship with Facebook," Just's art director Merjin Straathof said in a statement via Forbes.

"Whether it was being tagged in unflattering photos, getting into arguments with other users or simply regretting time lost through excessive use, there was a surprising degree of negative sentiment. Then someone joked, 'I guess that the real question is, 'How do you feel when you don't use Facebook?' There was group laughter, followed by, 'Wait a second. That's a really good question!" he added.

The advertising agency believes that 99 days without Facebook is not too long or too short of a period to study behavioral progress of a person, especially those who use Facebook.

If numbers get it right, there are 1.2 billion users of Facebook in the world, and each user spends 17 minutes a day or roughly 28 hours per week browsing through the social media site instead of spending such time doing much more "valuable" and "happy" activities.

Joining the 99 days without Facebook campaign can be easily done in three steps: Participants must change their Facebook profile picture with the 99 days program profile photo, click the "countdown" on the campaign website (https://99daysoffreedom.com/) and must not use Facebook for 99 days. Participants will then be sent with anonymous happiness surveys during the 33rd, 66th and 99th day of the social experiment to monitor progress.