Social mobile sensing and problematic alcohol consumption: Insights from smartphone metadata

•We used smartphone metadata on social activity (i.e., social media usage, phone calls) to understand the social context of problematic alcohol consumption.•We found that a 10-minute increase of social media usage was associated with an expected decrease of number of drinks by 6.7%.•The negative association between social media usage and alcohol intake was explained by a decrease in real-world social interactions.•Our study indicates that the objective assessment of social activity via smartphone metadata might be a novel tool to predict alcohol consumption and deliver timely interventions. Alcohol is often consumed in a social context. We aim to investigate whether social mobile sensing is associated with real-world social interactions and alcohol consumption. In addition, we investigate how social restriction policies implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic have influenced these associations. We conducted a smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) study for 7 days over a 213-day period from 8 August 2020 to 9 March 2021 in Germany, including both no-lockdown and lockdown stages. Participants used a smartphone application which passively collects data on social behavior (e.g., app usage, phone calls, SMS). Moreover, we assessed real-world social interactions and alcohol consumption via daily questionnaires. We found that each one-hour increase in social media usage was associated with a 40.2% decrease in the average number of drinks consumed. Mediation analysis suggested that social media usage decreases alcohol intake through decreased real-world social interactions. Notably, we did not find that any significant influence of the lockdown stage on the association between social mobile sensing and alcohol intake. Our study suggests that people who use more social media drink less, likely due to reduced face-to-face social interactions. This highlights the potential of social mobile sensing as an objective measure of social activity and its implications for understanding alcohol consumption behavior.