Abstract: The popularity of social media and our full engagement with it have rendered the study of its impact on the subjective well-being a topic of great significance. Based on the data from the Chinese Family Panel Studies (2020), it is found that: 1) proactive use of social media significantly enhances the subjective well-being, resulting in welfare effects; 2) the active use of social media affects the cognitive standards, positive emotions, and expected satisfaction of citizens, and is the main transmission mechanism of social media usage; 3) the model, overcoming endogeneity issues through instrumental variables and mixed regression methods, performs robustly; 4) there is heterogeneity in the transmission mechanism—women’s proactive use of social media mainly affects positive emotions; 5) the less education one receives, the more likely one is to change cognitive standards and expected satisfaction, while well-educated citizens tend to influence subjective well-being through positive emotions; 6) for rural residents, their proactive use of social media only affects cognitive standards, and the welfare effect is not that significant; 7) for the youth and the seniors, the welfare effect is significant; 8) middle aged residents are more likely to affect subjective well-being through influencing expected satisfaction.

Key words: social media, subjective well-being, active use